


The Rainbow Connection

by commoncomitatus



Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: 5 Times, F/F, Feelings, Gender Identity, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Synesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 15:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 44,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: "To be honest, I did wonder -- you were kind of an unusual boy."Five times Sandy wondered and one time she understood.Or: five times Sandy and Tripitaka hide together before, and one time they hide together after.
Relationships: Sandy/Tripitaka (The New Legends of Monkey)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 44





	1. Whatever I Fear

**Author's Note:**

> A weird little thing, attempting to work through my personal discomfort when writing the gods' POV in S1 and thus needing to use male pronouns for Tripitaka.
> 
> Also an attempt to explore different kinds of sensory perception. I'm not sure if synesthesia is a thing that exists in this universe per se, but Sandy's perspective is such a strange and disjointed thing most of the time anyway, it made a sort of sense that she might see the world in a similarly strange and disjointed way. A fun experiment in excessive sense-based purple prose, anyhow.

***

The sky is black, but it doesn’t taste like the sewers.

It tastes loud, it tastes angry, it tastes wild. It tastes like what it is: endless and vast and inescapable. She looks up and it is everywhere, all over her, like a great smothering blanket, like a wall of vapour, something she can feel but can’t touch, taste but not swallow, something big and heavy enough to devour her instead.

It tastes like fear, like exhaustion, like the years-faded memory of a childhood illness. It tastes like the moment after the moment before death, the moment her body realises it’s still alive and needs to find a way to get back up. Like the moment after that, too, when she has tried and failed too many times to care any more.

It tastes like a lot of things. But then, it’s so big and it takes up so much space, she supposes that’s to be expected.

It’s the middle of the night, and Sandy is definitely not still awake because she’s frightened of the sky.

Wary, maybe. Uncomfortable, yes. But frightened?

Well.

If she is, that’s her burden to bear. Hers, not theirs.

There’s a hollowed-out tree maybe half a league from where they’ve set up camp. She remembers this because her body lit up when she saw it, mouth flooding with warm broth and cold water, nose filled with the smell of slime and sludge, of rot and root and home.

With her powers, she could be there in less than a minute. She could crawl inside that rotted old tree, huddle down in the dark, wrap herself up in the smell and the taste of home, the rough bark against her skin, the mulch and dirt all around her, the warm familiarity of death and decay. It wouldn’t be exactly like the sewers — too fresh, too natural, too _here_ — but it would surely be closer than where she is now, this wide open nothing of dry grass and heavy air, the sky above ready to fall.

She could be back before the others woke. There and back again before they ever knew she was gone, before they ever had any reason to wonder why. She could be safe, secret and secluded, hiding, hidden, holed up in the hollow, and no-one would ever need to know. Just for a little while, she could be gone, she could be alone, herself, quiet, safe...

But then, if she was safe, _he_ wouldn’t be. 

Tripitaka. Human, small, vulnerable. There are a thousand dangers out here, a thousand threats both big and small. Without her there to stand guard, any one of them could make him their prey. She would be safe, but he would not. 

And that’s not an option.

 _Tripitaka_ , the most beautiful name she’s ever heard. It rings in her head, slides down her throat, settles in her stomach like a hot meal, the kind she’s never had. It sounds like all the colours that come with a cool spring rain, like watercolours on parchment, bleeding and melting and so soft, so soft, so soft. When she whispers it aloud she sees wet streets and deep oceans, she tastes salt on her tongue and water, fresh and clean and delicious; when she writes it down she hears music, lullabies and poetry, and she breathes and she sings and she feels safe and free. She—

 _Wait_.

He’s standing behind her. She can taste his presence, the shadows stretching deep and long, the colours reaching for her back, her blacks, her silver-whites.

Five paces, maybe ten. Breathing silently, steadily, not stealthily. Does he realise she can sense him, she wonders. Does he think he’s hidden? Does he—

“Sandy?”

Apparently not.

His voice is a lash of salt against her skin, bracing but beautiful. She can smell the sea, brackish water tickling the back of her throat, rising up into her mouth and then settling in her stomach when she swallows it back down.

“Tripitaka.”

She turns, finds him peering at her through the darkness. The clouds obscure the moon, and his face is a thing of mystery, silhouetted and blurry. He looks thoughtful, he looks worried. The onyx glimmer of his eyes makes her think of smooth silk sliding over her skin, catching on her callouses, tearing and shredding, ruined just like everything else she touches.

“Are you all right?”

He’s worried, yes, but he’s also sleepy; his voice slurs, distorted, scented with heavy perfume. She wonders if she woke him, if her presence is as oppressive to his senses as the endless sky is to hers. She wonders if he can taste her fear like she can taste his worry, his exhaustion, the way he’s secretly wishing he was still in bed.

She hopes not.

“Just standing watch.” The lie sticks to her tongue, a rich dark red. “Never know if a demon might be nearby. They hunt by night, you know.”

They don’t. Not exclusively, anyway. She would know: she does.

Well. _Did_. Now she’s supposed to sleep at night, eyes closed, thoughts still. Like it’s so easy to discard a lifetime of nocturnal habits, like she’s supposed to step out of the sewers and simply... be. Normal, like the rest of them. Sleep at night, travel during the day, and look up at the sky like something that big and heavy is normal too.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” Tripitaka says, oblivious to the lie. “Would you like some company?”

Sandy’s insides grow cold.

“That’s not necessary.” She tries to smile, to show appreciation, gratitude, but it is much, much harder than it should be. She is inexperienced at these things, a newborn learning to draw its first breath. Social interaction is as terrifying as the sky. “Go back to sleep, Tripitaka. You’re human, you need to rest.”

He doesn’t move. She didn’t really expect him to.

“Are you cold?” he asks instead, watching her more closely than she’s comfortable with. “You’re shivering.”

“No.” The truth, she knows, will give away her weaknesses, but Tripitaka stripped her of her defences the moment they met; she can’t lie to him, can’t even pretend or play dumb. She can only be what she is, smaller than she should be, honesty sharpened to a point so fine it rends the air. “I’m not cold. I feel... uneasy.”

Uneasy. Frightened. Much the same meaning, yes?

Tripitaka seems to agree, though he’s kind enough not to say so. “Is something out there?”

“No.”

The word comes more easily this time, warmth in her belly, the memory of food she didn’t have to kill.

Tripitaka studies her closely. The scrutiny turns that warm feeling into something sour, something sick.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I...” _Nothing. Go back to sleep. Let me protect you, as I’m sworn to do_. This, she wants to say but does not. Instead, cutting herself on that fine-pointed honesty, she shivers and says, “Um.”

Tripitaka narrows his eyes. Sandy smells citrus, tastes peppermint, and when he says her name it shines in pale blue and silver. “Sandy?”

She sighs. “I’m still not used to being out in the open. Exposed, vulnerable. The sky is so big, so endless. Nowhere to run, nowhere to...”

 _Hide_.

It’s too much, though, the effort of saying the word. The sentence dies with no end, unfulfilled like the pains in her chest when she looks up and remembers drowning.

She still can’t muster a smile, even a false one, and so Tripitaka does it for her. A little strained, a little tense, but he’s trying; it’s more than Sandy can do for herself.

“The sky can’t hurt you,” he points out.

The words grate along her nerves, serrated and rough, sandpaper on raw, broken skin. “I know that. But it’s been many years since I spent any amount of time under it. I’d forgotten how it tastes.”

Tripitaka blinks. “Did you say ‘tastes’?”

“Um. No?” She’s flushing, but her skin doesn’t change colour. It never does, stark as the moon, hidden behind those heavy, oppressive clouds. “I’m used to solid walls everywhere. Being able to reach out and touch them, ground myself, melt into their shadows. Having places to hide. Places to disappear. There’s nothing like that here, and I...” The shame is a weight upon her back; the words come hard, but she wills herself to finish. “As I said, I’m not used to being exposed. And we’ve been out in the open for so long already. I need to breathe. I need to...”

 _Hide_.

It is stupid. She knows it’s stupid. Stupidity, coloured like acid, lightning-strikes of neon green and cyan; it seethes inside of her, bitter and rancid and choking, choking, _choking_.

But Tripitaka doesn’t respond the right way. He doesn’t look like she’s said something stupid, he looks like she’s said something that wasn’t, something that actually made sense. He makes his smile softer, sweeter, like the smell of wet rose petals, and he steps forward and reaches out to touch her.

Sandy wants to flinch. But he’s Tripitaka, and so she won’t.

“Can we do anything?” he asks. “To make you feel better?”

Sandy looks down at his hand. He’s touching her wrist, the left one: no bracer, only fabric, ragged and tattered and frayed at the edges, shot and stuttered like her nerves. His fingers catch on the loose threads, a wanderer picking his way through a tangled forest, unafraid of the dangers lurking in its shadows.

She thinks again of the hollowed-out tree, its private little sanctuary, the darkness and the old, rotting wood. She thinks of being alone, of being lost for a while, of being unseen and unknown and invisible.

“I’d like to go for a walk,” she mumbles, staring at her sleeve, at Tripitaka’s fingers. “If that’s all right?”

“Of course it is. You...” He pauses, eyes narrowing a little further. She feels it like the crunch of bones under her boots and between her teeth. “Wait. What about demons?”

“I can take care of myself.” For once, she doesn’t even think to lie. If there were demons, she could most certainly handle them; that there aren’t makes it a double truth. “I’ll be fine, Tripitaka.”

“I’m sure you will. But none of us should be wandering off alone in the middle of the night.” He squares his shoulders, draws himself up to his full height, small though it is, and decides, with absolutely no room for argument, “I’ll come with you.”

Sandy stiffens. Her insides gnaw on themselves, confused and disoriented and still so very cold. She does not want company; she wants peace, she wants silence, she wants the smell of the sewer and its rot on her tongue. But he is Tripitaka, there is nothing she would not do for him, willingly and eagerly, if it made him happy. 

“It’s not safe.” The protest is laughably feeble. “You shouldn’t be walking around in the dead of night. You should be asleep.”

“I’ll have you with me,” Tripitaka counters, with the maddening cheeriness of someone who knows he’ll get his own way in the end. “You’re one of my protectors, right?”

“I...” Sighing heavily, she bows her head, and yields. “Of course, Tripitaka. If you would wander the night with me, I would...”

_I would enjoy your company. I would enjoy your closeness._

She doesn’t know if either of those things are true; in fact, she’s quite certain they can’t be. She has never enjoyed company or closeness in her life, from anyone. Those things always come at such a terrible cost, the taste of blood like a funeral march inside her head, dirt on her knees, the shattering of bones, hers and theirs.

The very thought of it paralyses her.

But he is different. _Tripitaka_ , the name alone warms the chill inside of her. He is pure and perfect, and he would never do the sorts of awful things she’s come to associate with company, he could never be like that. She’s waited a lifetime for him to appear and she has to believe, if nothing else, that he is not like that.

He squeezes her wrist. The loose threads of her sleeve tighten around his slender fingers, a garotte or a blanket wrapped too tight, carefully woven from nothing.

“Sandy,” he says.

On his tongue, her name sounds like firelight. Like soothing heat, like sanctuary, like watching the sun set after a long day. Like sleep, rare and elusive, lying in wait for the moment she closes her eyes. Like home, sort of, but ever shifting, ever changing, a gentle breeze guiding her further and further from the sky.

Sandy has never much liked the sound of her own name. On her tongue, it sounds like the bottom of the ocean, the deepest places that even she can’t reach; it is something lurking, something with sharp teeth and eyes that glow in the dark, the threat of drowning and the threat of surviving.

On her tongue, yes, but not on Tripitaka’s. She has never heard her name sound soft, has never felt her whole body engulfed in warmth, but here she is, feeling the gentle flames ripple over her skin.

“As you wish,” she says, and turns away before she starts to burn.

*

She doesn’t run, for Tripitaka’s sake, but she wishes she could.

There aren’t many trees in this place they’re journeying through. It’s a sort of savannah, mostly grass and scrub, the occasional gnarled old tree or hopeful little sapling. Sandy knows when they pass the places where life has taken root because the soil sings under her boots, water bubbling inside her head, glimmers of green, so much green, a future in the making.

She wonders if her future will be so lush, so full of promise.

In the past — back where the others are still asleep — Tripitaka has left a note. Monkey, Pigsy, the two of them oblivious and dreaming, like the world is so safe, like the sky couldn’t fall and crush them both to death. Quiet and still and utterly at peace, the sight of them made Sandy feel ashamed, so Tripitaka generously made the note out in his own name. _He_ wanted to go for a walk and _she_ offered to accompany him, to protect and watch over him.

Sandy did not expect a monk to lie so naturally or so comfortably. But then, perhaps it doesn’t really count as a lie when it’s being told to protect someone else. Even a mess of a god who should be able to protect herself.

The tree is exactly where she remembers.

Funny, that. So many things fall out of her head, so many memories lost or dropped or shattered, but this she recalls with perfect clarity. Perhaps it’s the way the ground shifts, tilting her balance like the taste of strong wine; perhaps it’s simply one of those things some delirious part of her thought would be important. She gave up many years ago on trying to navigate all the twists and turns inside her mind, all the useless things it holds close, all the valuable lessons it throws away.

The tree is hollow and dank, rotted all the way through. It is beautiful. 

Tripitaka, staring mournfully at it, does not seem to share this opinion.

“In there?” he whines. “Really?”

Sandy nods. “It’s small. Hidden. _Safe_.” The word gives her courage, more than she’d like him to see. “There is so much emptiness out here, Tripitaka. So much wide open space, so much _sky_. I want to be somewhere small, somewhere dark and cold and miserable. Somewhere I can remember how to breathe.”

Tripitaka doesn’t look particularly happy about this, but he doesn’t complain either. He crawls into the little space beside her, the two of them nestled in the empty trunk, and he accepts the discomfort with grace and poise and a monk’s patience. Sandy doesn’t have the heart to tell him that his presence makes her feel less safe; she cannot breathe any easier in here while his body is pressed against hers, the weight of his robes a strange contrast to her thin, hole-ridden rags, the soft, sandalwood smell like a hymn or a prayer, like someone else’s confession.

She draws her knees to her chest, flattens her back against the trunk, and makes herself small enough that Tripitaka can move a little more freely, without having to touch her.

The relief, once there is a little space between them, is indescribable. Pressed against the curve of the tree, shadows bending themselves around her, darkness and solidity on every side, she is hidden. If she closes her eyes and blocks out the sound of someone else’s breathing, she is _safe_. The world outside can’t touch her in here; it can’t reach through and pierce the shadows. If it does, it will lose any power it once had: in this small space it will become small as well. And Sandy has no fear of things that are small.

Tripitaka, studying her with his usual closeness, says, “You know, Monkey would really hate it in here.”

Sandy does know that. Perhaps even more intimately than Tripitaka does. She and Monkey were imprisoned together in Locke’s palace; locked up tight and without escape, she saw all the different shades of his anger-fear-helplessness, the neon red and all-consuming black, the white heat that made her feel like she was staring directly into the sun.

“He doesn’t like to be trapped,” she says, biting down hard on the memory. “He doesn’t like small spaces.”

Tripitaka’s expression shifts a little, subtly. Here in the murk, the flush of his skin makes Sandy think of freshly baked bread, healthy and wholesome but too hot for the tongue. She’s not tasted anything like that in many, many years, but her senses shape the flavour as if it she’d eaten it yesterday.

“He’s _afraid_ of small spaces,” Tripitaka says, and the words flow across his expression, butter melting on the bread, pulling it apart, softening and sweetening until it’s almost cool enough to eat.

Sandy wets her lips. The flavour lingers until she looks away, pressing her cheek to the half-rotten bark. “I don’t think he’d thank you for saying that.”

“Of course he wouldn’t,” Tripitaka says, and sighs. “He’s too proud for his own good. He’d never admit to anything he thought would make him seem weak.” His eyes seem to gleam, sharpening to a dangerous, glittering point. “It’s not something to strive towards.”

He means, _don’t try to emulate him, don’t be too proud to admit the things that scare you, don’t..._

Sandy inhales deeply, taking in the strong mulchy scent of the tree. Dead and decaying, a little like the sewer but sort of faded, greens and browns where she would expect blues and greys. It calms her a bit, painting the differences in her mind, sketching the space between then and now.

“You want me to say that I’m frightened,” she says.

Tripitaka shakes his head. “I want you to know that you _can_. That it’s okay to feel that way. That it won’t make you any less. You don’t have to pretend you’re keeping watch for demons that don’t exist. You don’t have to pretend you’re feeling ‘uneasy’. If you’re frightened, it’s okay to say so.”

“Frightened of the _sky_?”

It is ridiculous. It is absurd. And yet Tripitaka smiles like it’s not strange at all.

“The sky. The open space. All of it.” He shrugs. “You’ve lived underground your entire life. I understand why it might be frightening to step back out into the world.”

Sandy’s vision is pricked with tears, the sting behind her eyes like sunlight refracting off diamond. She hates that he understands, she knows she does, but her stomach is squirming in a way that isn’t as unpleasant as it should be, and she wonders if maybe there’s a part of her that doesn’t hate it so much after all.

“I’ll get used to it,” she says stubbornly. “I adjusted to life in the dark. I have no doubt I can adjust to life in the light just as well.”

“I don’t doubt that either.” The smile shifts, the colour with it. “But adjusting to new things can be frightening.”

He speaks as though from experience. Sandy recalls the Scholar, departed now from both their lives, from the world, from everything; she wants to offer her sympathies, her compassion, her own grief, but she doesn’t know how to do that. She doesn’t know if it would be welcome, and even if it was she doesn’t know where to begin, doesn’t know how to share any part of herself, least of all the parts that feel pain. She only knows to protect, how to hide, how to—

“I’m not afraid of adjusting,” she says; her voice echoes hoarsely, crackling like charred wood, smoke and ash in her lungs and her belly. “I’m afraid of...”

 _This_ , she doesn’t say. And _you_ , and _everything_ , and _yes, the sky_.

Because Tripitaka, who is right about everything, who is the hope and light of the world — of Sandy’s world, at least — is wrong about this: it’s not okay to admit that she’s frightened. Not for her, at least, not when the very thing that terrifies her comes to life between the notes of confession.

She is afraid of being exposed, of being vulnerable. She is afraid of a world that cannot hide her, a world that is too bright and too broad and too big, a world she cannot run from or crawl beneath, a world that will devour her if she lets herself be seen.

Admitting it will only bring that fear to life, even more than it already is. Out there, under the vast, angry sky she will cast off her clothes, her skin, her bones, she will throw herself naked and broken into the sea of Tripitaka’s mercy, and she will hope — only hope, with no power to do anything about it — that he’ll show her kindness, that he will not turn around and use that fear to—

To—

 _No_.

No, he’s not like that. He would never. It’s right there in the colours of his name, the gentle melody of his smiles, the scent of sanctuary rippling through his voice.

Sandy presses her back to the wall, hugs her knees, and shivers.

Tripitaka is staring at her. He looks sad, sort of fractured. His eyes are watering, like maybe he’s allergic to the mould and rot in the tree. Sandy thinks she needs to pull herself together, so they can leave and return to camp where he can breathe easier.

“Sandy,” he says, and the hated name echoes off the close walls, distorting until it tastes like boiling leather.

“I’m not afraid!” The words crack on the air, made jagged and brittle by her cornered-animal instincts; she cowers, hiding her face behind her hair so he won’t see the lie. “And even if I was, it wouldn’t prevent me from doing my duty. Why does it matter if I say it?”

“It doesn’t. But I want you to feel safe. I want all of us to...”

His pause lights up the inside of the tree, a lightning-crack in turquoise and copper. Sandy shakes her hair back, pierces the colours to try and catch the look on his face.

“Tripitaka,” she says, as slowly as she can. “Are _you_ afraid?”

Tripitaka laughs, breathy and a little shaky. “Not of the sky.”

He means it as a joke, Sandy is mostly sure, but it still stings. She flushes again, that colourless, translucent burst of shame prickling under her skin, skittering like insects without ever touching the surface. She feels her muscles lock and seize, her bones stiffen and grow taut. Her old instincts kick in her chest, telling her to show her teeth, to draw the knife from her belt, become the wild creature that needed its wildness to survive. Here in the dark and the damp and the rot-smell it would be so easy to just close her eyes and let it happen.

She doesn’t, though.

Because she can still see the shimmering spectrum of Tripitaka’s voice, can still taste the fresh spring rain of his smile, can still feel the phantom pressure of his—

 _Touch_.

Not her sleeve this time, and apparently not so phantomic as she thought, either. 

The backs of his fingers, cold as the softest blue, brush her cheek, as gentle as a breath, and Sandy’s mind promptly shuts down. She stares at him, eyes wide, heart hammering in her chest, a staccato rhythm so fast her lungs can’t catch up. Her skin is too tight, squeezing her muscles and her bones. She feels paralysed.

“I...” she starts, but the word tastes so foul she can’t bring herself to say more.

“Monkey won’t admit he’s frightened of anything,” Tripitaka whispers. “He thinks fear is a weakness.”

Sandy’s skin feels like scorched earth under his hand. She is trembling, shivering, ignited; she is hot and cold at the same time, and her body doesn’t know what to do.

“Pigsy is afraid of everything,” she manages weakly. “Even his own shadow.”

“I know.” He ducks his head, as if embarrassed, long dark lashes shrouding his eyes. “I know he’d understand if I spoke to him. But he’s not...”

Sandy doesn’t understand. The unspoken end — _you_ — hangs only briefly on the air between them, a low drone like the sting of a insect, sharp and quick and then gone. It doesn’t make any sense that she can see, and it makes her head hurt trying to force it.

“You have more in common with him than me,” she says. “Why would you...”

“I have more in common with you than anyone.” It sounds like a confession, like something deep and profound, but Sandy can’t imagine why. “There are parts of me that I’d only want to share with you.”

His fingers, delicate and slender, tremble against Sandy’s face. The contact stings, makes her think of things she thought she’d forgotten, loose skirts rustling in a gentle seaside breeze, the sound of laughter in sunlight, smiles and blushes and feeling like the sky was her friend.

Suddenly, the small cramped space of a hollowed-out tree feels as big and vast as the world outside.

“I don’t understand,” she stammers. “You’re a boy, a monk. Yours is a holy name and you are a holy soul. I lived in the sewers like an animal, I’m mistaken for a demon, I’m afraid of the sky. What is in me that could possibly be kindred to someone like you?”

Tripitaka doesn’t say anything for a long while, but his silence is cadent and musical; it shifts and hums like water bubbling over stone, and Sandy thinks she hears a thousand secrets whistling through its nothingness.

He’s still touching her. Sandy doesn’t like physical contact as a general rule, but there is a music in Tripitaka’s touch just as there is in his silence; the brush of his fingers bursts in her mouth like fresh fruit — or the vague, distant memory of freshness and fruit, flavours she is entirely unfamiliar with — and she hears the cracking of porcelain in the way he flexes and moves, the way his knuckles stroke her cheek.

There is a whisper on the tip of his tongue. She can taste it in the rhythm of his breathing, can smell it in the flutter of his lashes. A whisper, a confession; there is something deep and beautiful pressing on his larynx, something precious and profound and perfect, coloured like roses, like the sound of rain, gentler than a young man’s voice and softer than a monk’s fingertips.

He is so much, and she is so, so unworthy. Watching his lips move, feeling his fingertips caress her skin, she feels like she’s stepped into some hallowed, holy place, like a monastery or the sanctum of the gods, somewhere she doesn’t belong and shouldn’t be.

“We are kindred,” Tripitaka says at last. He sounds reverent, prayerful, like the way his robes smell at night, sandalwood dusted with smoke. “You and I, we’re both...”

He stops, sharp and sudden, like a gasp, like the way Sandy’s breath stalled in her throat when Monkey crushed her with his staff. The memory floods her senses, metal and ice and bruises on bone, and she thinks she sees a similar pain in Tripitaka’s eyes, the almost-death of something fragile and delicate in the same moment that it felt life in its heart for the very first time.

“We’re both fortunate to be alive,” Sandy hears herself murmur. “Yes?”

Tripitaka nods, but it’s different now, transformed. Sandy doesn’t know what she said, but she knows it was wrong; she watches the moment sputter and dissolve, extinguished forever. Its absence clangs in her ears, a death-knell, a crack of thunder lighting up the silence, and when Tripitaka takes back his hand the skin on her face feels it like a fracture of lost memory.

“We both have reasons to be afraid,” he says, after another lengthy silence. “And reasons to hide.”

Sandy’s chest bursts with a thousand new sensations, with light and music and warmth, with understanding. She is so raw, so new to this world and what it means to live in it; comprehension is a rare and violent thing. She doesn’t understand how to interact with people of any kind, doesn’t understand what it mans to be a part of something, but this she understands with perfect, crystalline clarity. It is what she, in her darkest moments, would have given anything to hear from someone else:

“You need never hide from me.”

Tripitaka chokes, as though overwhelmed by some deep, profound emotion. Sandy feels it in her own chest too, pain like a cracked rib, a sob like saltwater filling her lungs, like fallen leaves crushed beneath her boot, a release that can only come with death and destruction.

“Oh, Sandy.” His voice is a rasp, red-orange rust and the smell of burnt cinnamon. “I...”

“I’m serious.” She is. So much more than she could ever express in stupid clumsy words. “Your name has nourished me for so long, I can’t remember my life before I knew it. It is light and love, it is the only warmth I’ve ever felt. There is no part of you, good or bad, that could ever undo the things you’ve done for me, the countless ways you’ve saved me.” She reaches out, feverish and desperate, and takes his hand in both of hers. “You need _never_ hide from me, Tripitaka.”

The contact has a very different sensation in reverse. When Tripitaka touches her it is cool and crisp, pale blue like a winter’s morning, bursting with flavour and feeling; when Sandy initiates contact herself — something she never, ever does with anyone — it’s like explosive feedback, like the opposite of drowning, trying to draw air and expel water at the same time, like the moment where life and death exist at the same time.

Tripitaka is not, from Sandy’s observation, afraid of being touched. At least, he’s not afraid of it in the same way that she is. She has never seen him touch Monkey or Pigsy the way he touched her a moment ago, has never seen him instigate contact at all; he never offers his hands, but he doesn’t generally shrink from theirs either. When Pigsy slaps his back or Monkey grabs his wrist, he responds like a normal human: a little overwhelmed, perhaps, and certainly a little off-balance, but he takes it in stride and shrugs the moment off when it’s done.

That is not what happens now.

Now, with her, he seems possessed by some sort of primal instinct. He recoils, pulling back from her like he fears she has some terrible transmittable disease, like he thinks her touch carries some kind of poison. Like it — like _she_ — sickens him.

Sandy, who has just poured her soul onto the rotten ground between them, who has reached out for the first time in more years than she can count to touch another living soul, tries not to let it hurt.

“It’s not that simple.” Tripitaka’s voice cuts through the air, the colour of bleached stone. “Some things have to stay hidden, they just have to. You understand that, right? You, of all people, have to understand.” He’s pleading, she realises, and something tightens in her chest, a rope knotted and pulled taut. “Sometimes you have to hide things. Not because you want to, not because you’re frightened or uneasy, but because you _have_ to. For the sake of... of everything.”

His eyes are so wet. Sandy could drown in them. “I...”

“You understand,” he rasps, more desperate than she’s ever heard him. “Tell me you understand. Please, _please_ tell me that you understand.”

Sandy does not understand.

“I’ve only ever hidden for my own survival,” she says slowly. “Not for anyone or anything, only for myself. Perhaps that makes me selfish, in the eyes of someone like you.” The thought makes her feel sick and shaky inside. “I hope not. I’d hate for you to see me as selfish.”

Tripitaka shakes his head, a little too quickly. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

He’s staring at her hand, she realises, wide-eyed and pale, like he thinks it will leap up and bite him. Sandy draws back, retreating behind her knees, hugging them tightly.

“I’m sorry,” she says, though she doesn’t know what for. “I...”

“No.” He swallows a couple of time, as though steeling himself, then his shoulders grow strong again, the tang of cool iron pressing down on Sandy’s tongue. “It’s the same thing. A different kind of survival, maybe, born from different circumstances. But it _is_ still survival.”

Sandy musters a shaky nod. She still doesn’t understand, but she wants Tripitaka to think she does. She wants him to believe she’s worthy of being in his presence, worthy of sharing his confidence and confession, worthy of counting the colours in his name, tasting the fruits in his voice, relishing the freshwater scent in his eyes.

“I understand very little,” she admits, with only a fraction of the sorrow she feels. “But I am very good at surviving, and very good at hiding. Perhaps you might...”

Her tongue, clumsy and too full of the taste of sound, trips over itself; her skin is hot, her mouth sticky with sugar, and she can’t finish, she can’t say it, she can’t—

Somehow, miraculously, it doesn’t matter. For him, for Tripitaka, it is enough.

He smiles again, a shard of ice on Sandy’s tongue, coloured like quicksilver and tasting of rain. The smile fills the tiny space, settling in her chest, and then he shuffles closer. Close enough to touch her again — his choice this time, less terrifying for them both — and cover her hands with his, close enough to renew and rebirth the contact that made him flinch so violently a moment ago.

It makes Sandy tremble, the way he touches but will not be touched, but as someone who can barely endure either unless she is well prepared, she at least is able to understand this. A need for control, for order, to be able to decide for himself when he feels safe enough to survive the contact, or to seek it out.

“Sandy,” he says, and the name stutters like a flickering candle-flame, like the ghost of a kiss pressed to her temple, her clavicle, sweet and self-conscious and shy. “I would love to hide with you.”

And then, in a blink, the kiss is real: the chastest thing in the world, a brush against her cheek, feather-light and soft, following the path laid out by his fingertips before.

It is a whisper of a thing, barely there at all, but to Sandy, who has never been kissed in her life, it is a burst of sensation so powerful and profound that it shatters her completely. It is scalding tea poured onto her tongue, the electric smell of a storm about to break, the deafening, arrhythmic clamour of a celebration. It is a thousand things at once, all of them overwhelming, and it leaves her helpless and mute and utterly awed.

Sandy knows very little about gestures of affection. She has never known friendship or intimacy of any kind, has only witnessed such things from afar, confused and cowering in the shadows while humans or demons share their feelings with each other in dozens of different ways. They confuse her, disorient her, and she does not pretend to understand their nuances.

Monks, however, she does know. The Scholar taught her as much about their ways as he did about herself, and she knows that they do not, as a rule, do _this_.

Tripitaka doesn’t look startled when he pulls back. He looks like there is nothing odd about this at all. Through Sandy’s eyes — admittedly rather blurry right now, and tinted with flower-petal pink — he doesn’t look very much like a boy at all. He doesn’t look like the Scholar or any of the other monks she’s seen; he looks delicate and feminine and unfathomably beautiful, and Sandy finds that she can’t breathe, struck numb and dumb by how much she loves this name and this face that wears so many impossible colours.

“Um.” She touches her cheek. It stings a little, like scattered pinpricks of red upon yellow. “This is... unusual.”

Tripitaka ducks his head, blushing like the fading warmth of sunlight.

“I think we’re both a little unusual,” he says, and Sandy blushes a little too, unable to deny it. “I’ll hide with you, if you’ll let me. Maybe we’ll both find a way to feel safe.”

Sandy looks at him: his long lashes, his youthful, feminine blush, the way he doesn’t seem to think it strange at all, to kiss a woman — a _god_ — on the cheek, so open even here in the dark. She thinks there is something new in him now, something that didn’t exist before, and if only she had a better understanding of the world perhaps she would recognise it. But she knows so little of everything, and people least of all, and so all she is able to fathom is that it’s beautiful.

 _Safe_.

The word reverberates, bouncing off the walls of the tree, burning bright for a heartbeat and then fading to nothing; in the darkness that follows, its memory lingers, firelight on her tongue, warm soup in her belly, the promise of comfort she has never known. She thinks of the wide formless sky, of all that vast open space, endless and formless, waiting for her to expose herself.

All of a sudden, those things don’t seem so frightening.

**


	2. Covered In Roses

**

She happens upon him by chance, getting dressed after a long bath, and he nearly takes her head off.

They’ve stopped for a few hours at a quiet little oasis in the middle of the barren lands, catching their breath and enjoying some much-needed rest after a couple of long, hard-travelling days. ‘Downtime’, Pigsy called it, then promptly demonstrated why the name was appropriate by throwing himself down onto the wet sand and falling asleep.

Sandy, being rather more exhausted than she’d like the others to know, appreciates the chance for solitude far more than relaxation. Too much time on the road, she supposes, trapped between Pigsy’s complaints and Monkey’s short temper; she’s been feeling shaky for some time now, her head pounding and her senses raw and overstimulated. She is still getting used to being part of the world, and no adjustment has been more painful or difficult than the constant company.

Not so long ago, isolation and solitude were all she knew. Now, all of a sudden, those things are luxuries, rare and treasured, tiny islands of quiet in a sea of never-ending noise and chaos, fleeting moments she can no longer depend upon.

She loves her new friends. She loves them in the only way she knows how to love anything: wildly and completely and with everything she has in her. But they are so _loud_ and so _present_ and _all the time_ , and sometimes she cannot bear them.

The air here is clean, sparkling with fresh water. It seems to glitter under the mid-afternoon sun, like little flecks of ice too pristine to ever melt. Sandy can taste them on her tongue, cold and bracing and delicious, and the whisper of the wind fills her with the smell of grass and fallen leaves.

She feels alive meandering among the reeds and rushes, alive in the presence of so much pure, perfect water, alive surrounded by silence and simplicity. There is still so much in the world that frightens her, that makes her ‘uneasy’, but places like this, running water and blessed solitude, remind her that it can be beautiful too, that there is peace to be found even amidst the terror, if she can only stop shaking for long enough to breathe it in, if she can only quiet the pounding of her head and her heart for long enough to hear it.

She is thinking of nothing but that as she wanders, swimming in the fractured sensations, the colours dancing on the air, the smell of water, the taste of the sand and earth under her feet. The world, such as it is, softened for once into a form she can endure, a form she might one day learn to love.

For once, she is not thinking of Tripitaka at all. 

Not until she turns a corner, steps into a clearing, and sees him.

He’s facing away from her, angled so that all she sees is his back, and he so distracted that he doesn’t notice her presence at all; pulling on his robes, muttering under his breath, he is oblivious to everything, and the sight of him startles her so much that for a moment she almost doesn’t realise what she’s looking at. She is stunned, overpowered by the taste of her own surprise and confusion and the cool flower-petal smell that always seems to settle over her when she sees him.

She sees nothing else. She’s not even really looking. She just freezes. Paralysed, confused, the wheels in her head grinding to a sudden, jarring stop. She has never been in a situation like this before, and she has no idea what she should do.

Her reflexes are clashing inside of her, dulled and useless; she feels like a rabbit caught in the path of an oncoming cart, already tasting her own blood, her own death. She doesn’t know what is appropriate — should she announce herself, turn around and run for her life, or simply fall unconscious and save them both the trouble of dealing with it? — and so her body simply shuts down.

Her tongue is coated with the metallic tang of panic, the oil-on-ice chiaroscuro of confusion, the—

She whimpers.

Tripitaka turns.

He’s mostly dressed by now, robes dishevelled but covering his body well enough, but he’s clutching his scarf to his chest like it’s the last barrier of his modesty, like there is something shameful and terrible hidden underneath. Sandy stands there, stammering and terrified, struggling to unclench her throat enough to muster an apology, but Tripitaka doesn’t give her the chance: he lets out a cry, wild and blind with anger, and scrabbles in the dirt for something to throw at her.

“Get out!”

Sandy flinches. She has never seen him so angry before, and certainly never so angry with her. Monkey, once or twice, when his arrogance or tactlessness crosses a particularly narrow line, but never her. She’s the quiet one, the polite one, the patient one; she mostly just keeps to herself and they all know she would never, ever, ever do anything she thought might harm Tripitaka in any way. He’s never had any reason to be this angry with her. He’s never—

The first projectile, a clod of dry earth, she catches automatically, without a thought, but then he follows it with another and another, too many to try and count, and even a god has only two hands.

“I’m sorry,” she whines, ducking a rock, a spray of grass, a fistful of sand. “I didn’t know you were—”

“Go _away_!” Another rock, larger with jagged edges, thrown with real violence. It finds its mark, a glancing blow to her temple that makes her ears ring. “Get out of here! Get away from me!”

The words hurt terribly. Much, much worse than the projectile.

Sandy’s legs buckle. Her vision floods with smoke and fire and ash; she can’t see anything except the anger, the violence on Tripitaka’s face, the fury as he raises his hand. He’s runout of things to throw at her by now, and he looks ready to use his fists instead, to launch himself at her and start raining punches. Useless, of course, a human trying to strike a god, and yet Sandy knows beyond all doubt that one blow from him would finish her.

She stumbles backwards, never taking her eyes off the terrible anger on his face, flushing a shade of red so dark it burns Sandy’s throat, rancid like poisoned wine; she feels like she’s swallowing molten metal, every part of her blistered and burned by the sight of him so furious, the certainty that _she_ is the reason he is like this, that she has done something — even if she still doesn’t understand what — so horrible that he would willingly do her harm.

“I’m sorry,” she cries again, frantic and frightened, voice faltering along with her steps as she retreats, retreats, retreats. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were, I’m sorry, I was—”

“Sandy!” His voice, harder than any projectile, carves a path through her babble, cutting it off with the scattered pain of salt on a still-bleeding wound. “Just _go_!”

Hurting far more from the words than the wounds, she does.

*

She finds a little cavern behind a waterfall, and hides there, shivering and scared and so, so small.

The water is beautiful, blessed, brilliant. She could reach out, if she wanted to, and thread her fingers through the falls, feeling its prismatic colours dance and shimmer across her skin, nourishing, nurturing. She could turn her head to the side, press her cheek against the damp wall of the cavern and breathe in the smell of natural water, crystals on her tongue and a flood in her belly, crisp and sharp and clean.

If she wanted to.

But she doesn’t.

She feels flayed. She feels pulled open, like someone has reached into the hidden places under her skin and ripped out her insides, rotten and decayed and evil. She feels like she felt for all those years in the sewers, like a twisted nightmare of a thing, a monster, a demon, the beast that lived in the darkness and devoured the light.

_Get away from me!_

She’s heard those words a thousand times, in a thousand ways; the only connecting thread is the pain they always cause. The old and crippled, their voices tinted with purples and dark blue, their fear and hate like the threat of an endless night. The young, angry, downtrodden, dripping venom, warnings and threats like poison poured down her throat, making her ill. Children with protective parents, terrified and manic, the smell of lightning and thunder in the air, ready to burst.

The same words, over and over, each time telling a slightly different story, each one smothering with a new kind of pain, each finding their mark in the end. Sandy has more scars from those words than any demon or weapon she’s ever fought.

She never imagined she would hear them from him.

 _Tripitaka_. Even now his name fills her with more sensation than even a god’s body can endure. Even now, as she hears those words in his voice, sees them reflected in his eyes, feels them lash her skin, blows upon blows.

She’s never seen him so wild, so frenzied. Frustration is a familiar flavour, even on the ever-calm monk; he has lost his patience before, with all three of them: Monkey for his arrogance, Pigsy for his laziness, and Sandy, too, for her lack of comprehension. She knows what she is, how she is, and she doesn’t take it too personally when he throws up his hands, swallows back a sigh, and mutters, _can you at least try to pay attention for once?_

But there is a great difference between frustration, even bordering on annoyance, and blind, violent rage.

Would he have responded the same way, she wonders, if Monkey or Pigsy had stumbled on him instead?

Sandy is aware, at least tangentially, of the most obvious difference between herself and her male companions. It’s not something she often wastes any thought on, or ever did before — in her experience, violence is just as likely to come from another woman as from a man — but she understands well enough why it might bother a holy man like Tripitaka, why it might be cause him more distress to be seen by her than one of them.

It’s not personal. She knows this. She understands it. At least, in her head, she does.

But his _words_...

They strike a part of her completely disconnected from her rational mind, a part that aches and remembers things it doesn’t want to. She can’t unhear them, can’t unsee them, twisted and turning the air black as they fall out of him and into her, tangling around her throat, tightening across her chest, a noose, a garotte, a strap holding her down, an angry mob baying for her blood.

Anger is a familiar flavour, but in Tripitaka it takes a new, strange shape. Sandy is used to it having keen edges and pinpoint-precision, used to feeling it like a thousand quick cuts, a lash against her back, a blow to the head and the reeling concussion that follows. She’s used to tasting it like the tang of acid or poison, the sting of too much spice, the pain in her throat when she swallows it down the wrong way. In normal people, people who aren’t _him_ , it is like that.

In Tripitaka, though, it is something entirely different. It is a sawblade, a serrated thing, the sprinkling of sand on stone, gritty and uneven; it is a dozen exotic flavours that don’t mix, stirred poorly. It is nausea churning in her belly and not staying still, it is the rippling up-and-down scream of burns and blisters and badly infected wounds, the queasy throb after a head injury, the inability to focus her vision after she loses consciousness.

She doesn’t know what to do. She is scared and confused, and she has no idea how to rectify this.

She tried to apologise. She tried, she did, she tried so hard, but he didn’t want to hear it. He shouted at her and threw things at her, he raised his voice, he raised his fists.

_Get away from me!_

Again and again, all through her life. She thought that time was past, she thought it was safe to be in the world again, she thought—

She thought a lot of things that turned out to not be true.

In her mind’s eye, she sees her father. She hasn’t thought about him in so long, his face a lifetime away, a thousand leagues or more, but she sees him now as if all those years never happened, as if he were standing here in front of her right now. His anger was a wild thing, more terrifying than Tripitaka’s by far; she is stung by the sight of it, the sharp smell of salted fish, the bitter taste of medicine. She watches, again, as he turns away from her, hears the venom in his voice as he tells her to never, ever return; she counts the colours of his hate, new and strange and upsetting, and she remembers thinking, over and over, _what did I do wrong?_

Another mistake that she did not understand and could not rectify.

Will Tripitaka abandon her here, she wonders. Will he turn his back on her, order her to leave the quest, leave his side? Will he hate her too?

She’s never had a friend before, and she learned many years ago that she doesn’t deserve a family. She doesn’t know if there truly is such a thing as forgiveness, or if someone like her would be worthy of it. She’s never experienced it, and she doesn’t know how to ask.

The only thing she knows, the only thing that ever brought her comfort, is this. Hiding, hiding, _hiding_.

So she does. Alone and afraid, trying desperately not to cry even knowing that no-one would see, she curls up on the cold wet ground and hides, as she always has, behind the rush of living water.

*

She must have fallen asleep at some point, lulled by the friendly roar of the falls, because the next thing she knows someone’s shaking her awake.

Must have been sleeping deeply, too, because when she blinks her eyes open the world is misty and half-faded, like strong spices on a tongue burned numb.

She tries to sit up but her limbs are stiff and sore. Tries to speak but her mouth is thick with sleep, and she can’t seem to shake the grogginess out of herself.

“Sandy?”

 _Tripitaka_.

Her heart stops, then starts again at double its former pace. Something seizes and stutters inside her head; her vision blurs and distorts. She tastes grass at the back of her mouth, catches the rancid dead-animal stench of her own fear, and the world around her is flooded with the bruise-coloured thrum of panic.

She sits up so fast her head spins, so fast she loses her balance; she sways, dizzy and disoriented, and Tripitaka has to steady her lest she topple back over.

“Ngh.” Sandy whimpers, helpless and disoriented. “Tripitaka?”

“Sandy.” There is a strange quality to his voice, a sort of silk-soft shimmering that is nothing like the anger she remembers, the rejection and violence she still feels like fractures in her bones. “Sorry. You were asleep.”

Sandy grunts, righting herself very slowly. “I know that.”

She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do, what she’s supposed to think or feel. She doesn’t know why he’s here at all, and she has no idea whether she should try to say something profound, try once more to apologise, or simply sit there as she is, silent and stupid and still sort of sleepy. None of them feel right, but she can’t see another path that does.

He’s crouched in front of her, one hand tucked behind his back and the other still outstretched, like he’s waiting for her to fall over again. He looks shy and small and strangely young, but not like a monk at all.

“I...” He wets his lips, looking a little helpless. “Hi?”

“Hello.” She wonders if he can see how hard she’s shaking, if he can hear the hammering of her heart, if he knows or cares that he is responsible for both of those things. “Are you here to tell me to leave the quest?”

“What?” The confusion is genuine. She can see it in his eyes, a flood of sensation that stings; it should bring her some comfort, she’s sure, but it doesn’t. “Why in the world would you think that?”

“You told me to get away from you.” Her voice breaks. She feels even younger than he looks. “You told me to _go_.”

She doesn’t know how to put the rest of it into words, the part where she has heard those words so many times over the years, so many voices ringing out in so many different colours but only ever with one meaning: _go away, leave this place, don’t ever show your face here again_. She doesn’t know how to make him see that there is no other way to interpret them.

He’s staring at her, eyes wide and sort of tearful; she doesn’t know if he understands any of that, or if he’s simply trying to process it, but either way he doesn’t seem in any hurry to speak. He just crouches there, opening and closing his mouth like all the words have been chased out of him, and for a moment Sandy wonders if she’s broken him.

Finally, stuttering back to life with salt in his eyes, he whispers, “Oh.”

Sandy swallows the relief at seeing him move, hearing him speak, seeing him come back to himself. She focuses instead on the task at hand, the oncoming pain, the need to make things easier for him, even now, even in this.

“I’ll go,” she promises. “I will. I won’t argue, I won’t fight or complain or resist. I’ll go as far from here as you want, and you’ll never have to see my face again. But I...” She feels her face crumple, emotion overpowering what little self-control she might have had. “I’m _sorry_ , Tripitaka, I’m really, truly sorry, I promise, I swear I didn’t know you were there, I didn’t _know_ , I...”

She didn’t mean to start babbling, but once she’s started she can’t seem to stop. The words pour out of her like the water cascading over the falls outside, frantic and desperate and thick with fear and pain; she is so completely swept up in them, the words and the feelings both, that for a long and terrifying moment she is sure she will never stop, certain that she will die like this, swept away in the white-water rapids of her own stupid voice.

But then Tripitaka says her name again — “ _Sandy_ ,” sharp but sort of soothing at the same time, like using ice-cold water to ease a fever — and the words return to her control.

“I...” She whimpers, floundering. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“Sandy.” Softly, carefully. “I came here to apologise to _you_.”

Sandy does not understand a single word of that sentence.

“I...” She feels very far away, like she’s drifting. “What?”

Tripitaka sighs, looking suddenly aged and weary. Sandy wonders if this is as difficult for him as it is for her, if he’s struggling, like she is, to recontextualise the parts of himself he thought he knew well. He’s a kind-hearted young man, a monk; it must be a strange and unsettling thing indeed to suddenly find himself so full of anger.

“I shouldn’t have lashed out at you,” he says, ducking his head as though in shame. “That was terribly unscholarly of me.”

Watching him, Sandy can taste the changing colours of his feelings, apple-red and pear-green. They clash on her tongue, churn in her stomach, and she doesn’t know how to respond or what to feel. The remorse is true, she can see that, but she still doesn’t understand.

“You were upset. You were right to be.” She’s biting her lip, trying to replace the taste of Tripitaka’s roiling heart with something else, the citric tang of fear, the bitter ash of pain, familiar flavours that are hers and not his. “I know how important privacy is to you. I know this, I...”

“I know you do. I know you’d never...” He swallows loudly; the sound echoes off the cavern walls like the smell of a cake baking slowly, stickily. “I know you’d never invade my space on purpose. I know that, Sandy, and I really am sorry. Truly. The way I reacted...”

He trails off, shaking his head. Sandy feels tears prick her eyes, dew on a spider’s web, delicate and damp. 

“This all very confusing,” she says, because what other truth is there?

Tripitaka winces, looking even more guilty, then slowly draws his other arm out from behind his back.

He’s holding something, Sandy realises belatedly. An odd-looking plant, a flower of some kind with flat, rich-coloured petals. Looking at it, breathing in its perfume, her mouth floods with the most exotic tastes, flavours she has never experienced and thus cannot name.

“A peace offering,” Tripitaka explains, blushing slightly. “A... a gift, I guess.”

Sandy blinks. “A what?”

“A gift.” He looks tearful again, like it hurts him somehow that she would have to ask. “You know, to apologise. I found it floating in the water. It seemed to thrive there. Like you.”

A fitting enough analogy, Sandy supposes. She doesn’t understand why it makes her face grow warm, imagining that he’s spent time thinking of her in such a way.

Curious, she leans in to study the little plant. It doesn’t seem to mind her scrutiny, but Tripitaka’s hands are shaking, either from its weight or his own nervousness. She liberates it from him, turning it over in her own hands, willing them not to start shaking as well.

“It’s...” She clears her throat. “It’s very colourful.”

It is _very_ colourful. Pink and white, but the pink is so rich and vibrant that the white seems almost blinding; she’s never seen a plant so vivid or vibrant. Beautiful, perhaps, but beauty has always made Sandy feel a little uncomfortable; after a lifetime in the dark and cold, she is still unused to colour of any kind. When she looks at it too closely or for too long, her stomach starts to feel queasy, the way it used to when she forgot to cleanse the sewer water before she drank it. The flavour is exotic and very strong; she’s not sure if she enjoys it.

Tripitaka, no doubt sensing that she’s not enamoured with the thing, says with his usual tact, “We can put it back in the water, if you like.”

The idea startles her, makes her feel strangely protective. She clutches the plant hastily to her chest, shaking her head with a vehemence that surprises her as much as it does him.

“I’ve never had a gift before,” she mumbles, heat creeping up her neck. “I don’t want to part with my first one.”

Tripitaka beams for a moment, giddy and exuberant. His happiness slips between her ribs and pulls tight the cords around her heart; it settles under her skin like a warm hearth, a home, like a place that might be safe.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “You really didn’t do anything wrong. I just... when I feel like my privacy is threatened, I...”

He hesitates, wringing his hands, like he doesn’t know how to explain it. The happiness evaporates, snow melting under a spring sun, the fading crunch of frost, a farewell to the chill. Sandy wants to reach out, to try and understand all of this, to try and make sense of all these conflicting emotions, his anger boiling away into guilt, into the need to atone for the brief fit of temper. He insists that she has no cause to apologise, but the moment spoke for itself: his reaction was so violent, so visceral.

“It was clearly very unpleasant for you,” Sandy says carefully. “Unintentional, perhaps, but I upset you and I’m sorry for that. I would never do you harm, Tripitaka, not on purpose. I wouldn’t... I _couldn’t_...”

All of a sudden, she is the one who can’t finish, who fumbles and flounders. Her heart is in her mouth, heat searing off the last fading memory of frost and snow, and she can’t seem to stop blushing.

“I know.” Tripitaka’s voice is a whisper, like mist-fine rain brushing against glass, or the way the air grows sweet as it cools with the setting sun. “You did nothing wrong, Sandy, I swear it.”

Sandy cannot fathom this. “I’m certain that’s not true.”

Tripitaka wrings his hands, looking frustrated and vulnerable all at once. Sandy has never seen him so helpless and so defiant at the same time, so much of so many things that clash and smash against each other, confusing and confounding and making her dizzy. His eyes are hot and then cold, they’re dazzlingly bright, almost blinding. She holds up the flower between them, lets its sickly-saccharine colours bleed through the air, painting it with the smell of petals and water, balming the hot-cold frenzy blazing from his eyes.

“It’s true,” he says, after an overwhelming beat. “It’s not you, it’s me. I don’t like feeling exposed.” He looks up at her, eyes gleaming with tears and with hope. “Surely you understand that? Feeling... _uneasy_.”

The word strikes home, and strikes hard. It clangs like a bell, echoing inside Sandy’s head, a spark of recognition, of comprehension that burns and burns and burns.

“I do.” Her voice cracks. “I know it quite intimately. Being exposed, being vulnerable... it’s dangerous.”

Eyes closed, breathing shallow, she remembers torchlight in her eyes, shadows thrown in every direction, silhouetting the angry faces of those who would do terrible things to her. She shivers, stomach dropping into her boots, feeling their words smash into her like rocks, violence of a different kind, less physical but no less real.

These are the moments she remembers. These are the ones that come back to her with perfect clarity, again and again and again, while the few pleasant ones are lost, forgotten forever. It doesn’t seem fair.

Tripitaka, no doubt sensing the dark alleys her mind has found, places a hand on her arm. It is comforting and disorienting at once, the contact bursting like berries in her mouth and nose, taste and scent at the same time. She wants to flinch away, because physical contact is doubly scary when she is treading the waters of memory like this, but a part of her also doesn’t.

“It is dangerous,” Tripitaka agrees, very quietly. He seems to be speaking to himself now, and the words carry a different shade of fear from her own; whatever it is that brought out such a violent reaction in him, whatever it is that makes him feel ‘uneasy’ it’s nothing like the torchlight in Sandy’s head. “I was acting on instinct. Trying to protect my... that is, um...”

He flounders, pulling away and taking his hand back. Without it, Sandy’s skin grows suddenly cold, sensitive under the frayed fabric of her sleeve, itching and sore. She looks down at the flower, breathes in its garish pink perfume, the seeping colours saturating her senses; it is overwhelming, and that’s exactly what she needs right now, its sensory overload steadying and sobering her.

“Yourself,” she offers, finishing the sentence for him. It hurts twice as much to say it because she does understand, because this instinct has been a part of her for as long as she can remember. “You were trying to protect yourself.”

“I...” He flexes his fingers, like he’s trying to shake off a phantom touch. “Yeah, I guess.”

It’s more complicated than that, Sandy can tell. The words are too thick, too heavy; they escape only with reluctance. She can feel them at the back of her throat, razor-sharp and serrated, like a fit of coughing in the throes of some terrible life-threatening illness. She can’t reach it, can’t touch it, and her experience tells her that this probably for the best: contact here, with this, will end in misery for them both.

She inches back, giving Tripitaka the space to breathe and think that she knows she would need in his place. Eyes still closed, she tries to picture the world through his eyes, to find the place of vulnerability in him that tastes so different to the one she carries inside herself.

“I understand,” she says, praying that her voice will not falter and shame her. “Really, I do. You’re a monk. Your body is a temple. As holy as your... your...”

 _Your heart,_ she doesn’t say, or _your spirit_ , or _your soul_.

Her voice does not falter, but her skin betrays her just as well: she’s blushing again, hot and embarrassed, her thoughts painting themselves in the heat on her cheeks. She is ashamed, awkward, she can’t bring herself to look at him, can’t bring herself to think, to feel, to—

Tripitaka touches her again, the back of his hand brushing the delicate petals of the plant as he covers her own, and Sandy promptly loses all hope of controlling herself.

“It’s not...” He’s looking down at their hands, at the flower. Sandy is deeply grateful; it keeps him from looking at the myriad colours staining her face. “I want you to know: it’s not because it was you. I would’ve reacted the same way if it had been Pigsy or Monkey instead. Probably worse, actually, because they’re...” He flushes as well now, rich and warm like melting butter, and Sandy feels a little less alone. “What I mean is, I didn’t react the way I did because of the way... that is, it wasn’t because you’re a...”

He gestures vaguely at her body, seemingly unable to bring himself to say the word.

Sandy peers down at herself. Her long limbs, her slim frame, a god’s strength hidden in sinew, her flat chest. She’s not sure she can say it, either.

“I’m not much of anything,” she says instead. “Certainly not much of a...” Her throat clenches; apparently she really can’t. “Well. _That_.”

She means it as a reassurance, but Tripitaka’s face sort of crumples as she says it, and she realises, too late to stop, that she’s once again said the wrong thing. His eyes are burning when he looks up at her, campfire smoke and the metallic tang of a blacksmith’s anvil, and he turns his hand ever so slightly to the side, finding her wrist and squeezing deathly tight.

“You are,” he whispers, with the raw, ragged reverence of a spilled secret. “If you had any idea how much of a comfort that is to me... how _important_...”

Again, Sandy doesn’t understand. Again, this makes no sense. There is nothing in her that should offer him comfort, least of all _that_ , the strange surrealism that is her sex. She barely understands it herself, most of the time; abandoned before she reached puberty, and on the verge of a much more important transformation, self-discovery was not exactly a major priority. What does it mean to her, really, other than stomach cramps and the calculating looks she gets from people who think she’s weaker than them?

She knows enough, of course, to know why it might make him uncomfortable — as a boy or as a monk, as any number of things, his perceptions are so different from her own — but she cannot fathom how the reverse could be true.

“You’re a boy,” she reminds him, perplexed. “I’m not.”

“I know you’re not,” he says, with peculiar emphasis.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to.” There is an edge to his voice now; he smothers it swiftly, but not before she catches it, a snowflake melting on her tongue, too fast to taste. This is important to him, she realises with a frown, more so than he wants her to know. “Isn’t it enough to know you bring me comfort? Isn’t that why you joined the quest in the first place? To offer help and comfort when I need them?”

It is. Of course it is.

It’s all Sandy has ever wanted, to be useful, to be valuable, to have merit in Tripitaka’s eyes. A lifetime in the shadows waiting for him to appear, to tell her she was worth something more than the filth and rot clinging to her clothes, sticking to her skin and her soul. A lifetime of waiting, and now he is here, giving her gifts of flowers, looking up at her with tears brimming in his dark, beautiful eyes, telling her that she — _she_ — brings him comfort.

It’s more than enough. It’s more than she could have imagined, more than she ever let herself wish for.

But she still doesn’t understand. She looks at his face and sees a boy, a monk, a holy name... but then he speaks or acts or looks at her, he offers her a flower or he kisses her cheek or he calls her a _comfort_ , and suddenly he becomes something entirely different, an elusive, unfathomable creature, one that may, if she tilts her head, look something like her.

She is confused, she is lost, and she understands so, so little.

But of course this is nothing new. When has she ever claimed to understand? When has the world around her ever been anything other than a churning mass of conflicting sensations, of contradictory inputs, of words that mean different things depending on the voice or the moment? Why expect this to be any different?

He’s looking at her, now, eager and hopeful and full of strange, swirling secrets, but still so warm, like the sun at its zenith in the sky, beautiful but blinding. He’s not angry any more, and he’s not telling her to leave, he’s not saying _get away from me_ , he’s not sickened by her or frightened of her, he doesn’t _hate_ her—

He says she gives him comfort. He says she is important.

Sandy gently sets the flower down — a gift, her gift, the gift he gave to her — and shivers right down to her bones.

“Of course,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to...”

Tripitaka shakes his head, dark eyes seeming to glow with emotion, with power, with so many things that Sandy has never before seen in another living soul. He looks nearly as overwhelmed as she feels, perhaps even more so. Sandy doesn’t understand that either, but this time she knows better than to say so out loud.

“I wish I could tell you,” he whispers, tearful and hoarse. “How much it means to me. Having another... that is, having someone like you here with me.” His voice cracks, hitches, trembles like her heart. “It makes me feel less alone.”

Sandy furrows her brow, trying to process this.

 _Someone like you_. It could mean a lot of things, too many for her to pick just one. She is so different from Monkey and Pigsy in so many ways, not just in her gender and her body. Tripitaka could just as easily be speaking about the fact that he, like she, is adrift in the world. They are both lost and alone, both creatures born to a fate that was beyond their understanding for so long, both thrown out into the cold, stranded in a twisted world void of compassion, both—

She stops. It hurts too much to think of it.

It makes her feel cold inside, shards of shattered ice piercing the space between her ribs, splitting her bones apart, making it difficult to breathe. No-one deserves to know so intimately the horrors that shape a life like hers, and there is not a soul in the world who deserves such pain less than Tripitaka. She would endure it a hundred times, a thousand, if it would keep him from suffering even just once.

This time, though, she knows to keep her feelings to herself. She doesn’t ask, doesn’t voice her confusion or her distress, doesn’t broach the subject at all. His feelings, whatever they may be, are his own, and he clearly has no desire to share them. She doesn’t need to understand his motivation or his meanings to understand that much, and she doesn’t need to be the blithe loyal companion she is to respect his need for privacy.

“I’m glad,” she says. Careful, cautious, but she means it. “No-one should have to feel alone, Tripitaka. If I can help you to feel less so, even if it’s only a little bit, I don’t care why.”

She must have said the right thing for once, because his mouth falls open in a desperate sort of whimpering sound, and then he throws his arms around her with all the strength of a god.

“Thank you.” The words burrow into her chest, making a home between her ribs. “Thank you.”

Sandy, feeling light-headed and anxious from the unexpected contact, pats his back.

“Anything,” she mumbles, drowning in the taste of his robes, pale blue and ocean-fresh. “I know loneliness as well, Tripitaka. You saved me from a lifetime of it. If I can return that favour somehow... if I can...”

She stops. There are tears in her chest, spilling out into the place where his gratitude rests, turning her breath ragged, weakening her voice. She tastes seawater on her tongue, crisp and sharp and stung with salt; it makes her remember things she doesn’t want to, makes her feel things that hurt much worse than a blow, that shake her harder than a lashing storm, that tear her apart from the inside.

Tripitaka doesn’t say anything, but there is salt in him as well, a little sharp and a little stung but not so close to the sea; he shakes against her like a boat on rough waters, but with him there is always a shore in sight. Sandy wants so badly to protect him, but she is drifting so much farther than he is, caught up and wave-tossed by the dual sensations of his embrace: the fear and dread that always comes with being touched, and the firelight smell of his name, his arms, of warmth and home and _him_.

There are tears in his eyes when he finally pulls away, a thousand tiny rainbows refracted again and again; in them, Sandy sees the garish pink and white of the flower, his gift to her, and the ash and soot of her own face, demon pale and dirt-smudged, all the things that are so at odds with him, all the things he thinks makes them kindred.

“One day,” he whispers, and the words shimmer on the air, blue like his robes, like his heart, pale blue and so beautiful. “One day, Sandy, I promise...”

Again, Sandy finds that she doesn’t understand, but this time she knows that she doesn’t need to, that it’s not important. She has only ever received a promise once in her life — _one day, a monk named Tripitaka will appear..._ — and that moment led her to this one, to another ‘one day’, another promise, another new path for her life to take. That is all all she needs to know and all she needs to understand.

“I promise too,” she says. “If I happen upon you in a private moment again, I promise I’ll turn around and flee. I won’t look, I won’t hesitate, I promise. I’ll just _go_.”

The word echoes off the cavern walls, heightened and amplified. Tripitaka seems struck by it, dazed like Sandy was by the rock he threw at her head. Again, it’s different on him; even dizziness looks beautiful, looks radiant, looks like something good. There is anguish on his face, private and locked away, but there is relief there as well, like the word is a massive weight off his shoulders and a source of terrible grief at the same time.

“One day,” he says again, trembling and turning away, shoulders hunched like he’s trying to shield his body from her eyes. “One day, you won’t have to. One day, you’ll understand everything.”

Maybe so. Maybe not. But it doesn’t matter. The future, Sandy has learned, is a distant horizon, so far away it might as well be another world entirely. It’s foolish to waste time wondering what creatures might lurk there, and more foolish by far to waste tears and thoughts on hoping they won’t hurt her. Tripitaka is a monk and his body is a temple; until either of those things change, Sandy can’t imagine that anything else will. Let her bring him comfort, for now, from whatever distance makes him feel safe. One of them, at least, should have a chance to feel that way.

As for ‘one day’...

Well.

Sandy has spent her whole life waiting. She can wait a little longer.

**


	3. Azul Palido

**

The fear comes in paler colours now, but it still comes.

Sandy wonders sometimes if she’ll ever be truly free of it, if her body would even know how to survive without the rush of blood and dread. She wonders if she’ll ever be able to stand in an open field, gaze up at the star-pricked sky, and not feel the queasy gurgle of panic in her gut. She wonders if she’ll ever be able to venture more than ten steps from the nearest shadow and not immediately brace for an assault.

She wonders — now, specifically — if she will ever see the gates to a village or town and not feel the terror coil inside of her, a viper with blood-wet fangs, readying to strike again.

Once, long ago, she might have found some comfort in a moment like this. Returning at last, after weeks under the sky, the sun, the moon, to the closed walls and dark alleys of civilisation, to the twisting turns, the cracks and crevices and cobwebs, the dark corners that were once her home. So many places to hide, so many shadows to wrap around herself, shielding, shrouding, sheltering. Once, a place like this would have made her feel safe.

Not any more.

She is a creature of the light now, at least in theory. She’s supposed to walk under the sun, under the lamps and in front of the candles. She’s supposed to step out of the shadows now, not vanish into them. There is no place for her in the darkness any more, Tripitaka says, and Sandy still doesn’t know if that is a comfort or a terror.

Some days, she thinks, it might be both.

Today...

Today, it can only only be one.

She stands at the village gates, listening to Pigsy and Tripitaka talk about how wonderful it will be to sleep in a proper bed for once, listening to Monkey grumble about how weak and soft they are, watching as he tries and fails to hide his own smile. She stands there, apart and distant from them all, watching the lights dance above their heads, bright and beautiful and smelling of fresh grass, and all she can think is, _there will be blood_.

A lifetime of experience has taught her well; a lifetime of pain has ensured the lessons stick. She knows how to look for the signs in a place like this, the marks of peace or violence. A village with warm hearths, sturdy buildings, bustling streets, those places are safe; those people have likely never seen a demon, have certainly not been hunted or tortured or cut down for saying the wrong thing in the wrong moment. Those places, Sandy could walk freely among the people, eyes closed and head full of daydreams, imagining for a little while that she might one day pass as one of them.

Places like _this_ , however, tell a very different story.

The gates hang open, bent and broken and all but useless, and the scene beyond is little better. Houses with shattered doors and smashed windows, empty homes and empty streets, the kind of heavy, air-bending silence that stains the walls in black and red. It paints a vivid, visceral picture, one that does not bode well at all.

Sandy has read this story. She has _lived_ this story. A town crushed to dust beneath a demon’s heel, its people rising up at last to overthrow their oppressor, and then, exhausted, rebuild. The mess left behind, grief and confusion and that awful silence, the horror of having to dig the world out of its own ashes. There will be no warm welcome in this place.

She wonders — idly, to distract herself — what inspired the rebellion here. Was it just good timing, or did inspiration come in a more divine, godly form? Word of Monkey’s return has spread among the people like wildfire; it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve met with downtrodden souls who stood up in his name to take their fates back into their own hands.

It also wouldn’t be the first time they’ve met with people still recovering from such a thing. The blood still running, the wounds still fresh, the fear...

Well. Sandy is intimately acquainted with fear.

People like that have little to spare, she knows. Struggling to rebuild their lives and their homes, they carry so much on their shoulders already. It is understandable that they would be wary of newcomers, even one who wears the Monkey King’s crown.

Understandable, too, that they might think the worst when faced with someone like her.

Sandy knows exactly what she looks like. Her face has been painted in demon’s colours for as long as she can remember; she has been called by that name more times than she’s been called by her own. There is nothing new in the dread that pools in her belly now, the certainty of what kind of welcome to expect from this newly-liberated village. She is long accustomed to being called a demon, long accustomed to being feared and despised for the way she looks and speaks and moves.

She wonders if it will ever stop hurting. She wonders if she will ever know how it feels to look at a shattered door and not worry that her bones will be next.

She thinks she’s concealing it well, the feeling of foreboding, but apparently it’s just one more of her old talents that vanished when she stepped out of the dark.

Tripitaka, apparently too well attuned to her mood, leans in and touches her arm. “Are you all right?”

His concern is such a soft thing, the smell of the sea, a cool river rushing across her skin, pale blue and crisp apple-white. On another day, it might soothe her; today, it’s a keen-edged reminder that she has lost her greatest, most important talent: she cannot _hide_.

Still, stupidly, she tries.

“Of course.” The falsehood leaves a sour taste in her mouth, charred and stale, but it doesn’t stop her. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

He frowns, as though trying to figure out whether or not to believe her. “You’re even paler than normal.”

Sandy looks down at her hands. They’re shaking, ash-white, gripping her scythe so hard her knuckles are pulled taut. She’s never been particularly good at controlling her body, and it always enjoys giving her away.

“I’m fine,” she insists weakly.

Tripitaka squeezes her forearm, gentle but pointed. The bite of pressure mingles with the fear, rust-red darkening to dried blood, to the memory of pain and violence and fear: a blade in her belly, a fist to her face. She’s a god, never truly helpless, but it is so hard to remember her own strength when she’s surrounded by humans smelling of hate and tasting of rage.

Tripitaka is neither hateful or angry, of course. But his touch still strikes the same nerves, making her shiver.

“Sandy.” He keeps his voice low, careful; she gulps it down like water. “It’s okay. I know you don’t like people.”

Sandy shakes her head, but her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth, panic turning her saliva to acid, her words to mulch. She can’t speak, can’t tell him what she so desperately wants him to know: that he’s got it wrong, that she has never hated people, that it is _people_ who hate _her_ , that it has always been that way for as long as she can remember.

Tripitaka, taking her silence as everything it is not, lets his hand slide down from her arm to her wrist, and then to her palm. It’s effortless for him, the way he wraps his fingers around hers, a simple, thoughtless gesture, but it makes Sandy’s heart leap up into her throat. If she wasn’t already struggling to breathe, she certainly would be now.

“I don’t...” Her voice sounds strained, as shaky and wretched as the rest of her. It stutters on the air, a strange pale green, but at least it is her own. “People aren’t the problem, Tripitaka. I am.”

His response is predictable, expected. It’s taken her a long time to reach this point, but all of a sudden she finds it’s no surprise, the way he looks up at her, starry-eyed and prismatic-soft, reshaping the sickly air into something that even she, a messed-up, ragged wretch of a god can breathe.

“You’re not a problem, Sandy.”

Monkey, standing smugly on Tripitaka’s other side, rolls his eyes. “That’s debatable,” he quips, with none of Tripitaka’s softness. “Are we done chatting? Can we get going already?”

Sandy’s heart seizes, a spasm that almost chokes her. She’s certain Tripitaka must sense it somehow, because he tightens his grip on her hand until it almost hurts, squeezing so hard it’s like he’s trying to pour the life back into her, like he thinks he can still the tremors by sheer force of will. Sandy hates that it doesn’t work; she would do anything for him if she could, but she is so weak and her fears have always been so hard to swallow.

“It’ll be fine,” Tripitaka says, with a smile that settles on Sandy’s tongue like melting snow. “I promise.”

Sandy doesn’t believe that. But he does, and his conviction is the most beautiful shade of blue she has ever seen.

*

The fear grows stronger once they’re past the village gates, and with good reason.

Tripitaka doesn’t let go of her hand, which tells Sandy she’s probably wearing her heart on her sleeve again, as she often does when she’s feeling too much to keep it all down. She wants to run away, to throw herself into one of the dark alleys or darker corners, the shadows so close she can practically taste them, swirly and mist-cool and tempting. She is scared and she wants to hide, needs to hide, _could_ hide, but Tripitaka is holding her so tightly that she can’t break away; helpless, as she always is when he touches her, she can only follow in his footsteps, swept up in his beauty and his strength.

The streets smell of blood, but the others don’t seem to notice. They don’t notice, either, the sharp looks in the villagers’ eyes as they walk by, the journeys passing behind them like flashes of light against a cracked mirror. Excitement, understandably, when they see Monkey, because he is exciting and impossible and even Sandy is amazed sometimes to think that she’s allowed to keep his company. Curiosity, perhaps a touch of trepidation, when they see Pigsy — _he’s so big!_ — and Tripitaka — _he’s so small!_ — and then, inevitably, they land on Sandy’s lean, black-wrapped figure. The excitement and curiosity vanish, then, evaporating like mist, and there it is, a lightning bolt that destroys everything it touches: the anger, the violence, the pain.

The assumption that she is the demon she looks like.

She’s entirely forgotten how to explain that she’s not.

Tripitaka squeezes her hand. Once, then again, then again, little pulses finding a slow, steady rhythm; it takes Sandy a while to realise he’s mirroring his own heartbeat, calm and composed, trying to slow the pounding of hers.

“Sandy,” he whispers, low and confidential. “It’s okay.”

He still believes that, even now. Blessed, beautiful idealist that he is, it’s the only truth he can fathom: that this will be okay, that everything will be okay, the village and its people and the wider world beyond, because they are the good guys and she is a good god and they walk on the side of good and fight for what is good, and these good people will somehow, miraculously, see that there is goodness in her.

He can’t imagine any other possibility. Goodness is a beacon: it shines, it is seen, it makes the world better.

Sandy, who has spent a lifetime trying to be good only to be told again and again that she is the opposite, can’t see things in such simple terms. The air around her is black with hate, it is red with blood, it is too dark and too bright and it hurts, it hurts, it _hurts_. The goodness in her, if it was ever there at all, tastes like poison, like acid: it makes her sick, makes her scared, makes her shiver and shudder and shake.

“These people have suffered terribly,” she manages. “This place... you can see the damage. You know what must have caused it. I don’t want them to suffer more.”

She means, _I don’t want to be the reason anyone suffers._ But her tongue is thick and heavy, and her head is full of fear and pain and noise, and she can’t find the words.

Tripitaka, who therefore doesn’t hear them — and who probably wouldn’t believe them even if he did — just smiles. It’s a beautiful smile, like all his smiles, but it is the smile of someone who only knows the path of peace, someone who has never been told that they’re a monster, someone who has never had any reason to believe it’s true.

“We can help them,” he says. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“I thought we were here to get a half-decent meal,” Pigsy grouches. “That’s why I’m here, anyway.”

Sandy ignores him, but takes the opportunity to let the subject drop. She can tell by the blithe, beautiful look on Tripitaka’s face that he will never grasp what she’s trying to tell him, not until one of these angry, wounded villagers tries to take matters into their own hands.

They’ve been fortunate on the journey thus far: Monkey’s larger-than-life persona usually staggers people into accepting all of his companions on equal terms, even the one they clearly don’t trust. A few muttered insults, some under-the-breath grumbling — and Sandy wonders if Tripitaka’s hearing is good enough to catch that — and most are content to step back and simply give her a wide berth.

Instinct, honed and sharpened and bevelled to a fine point, tells her this won’t be the case here. The air is still heavy with the smell of blood, rancid and sick with its metallic tang; whatever victory these people pried from the demons who once lived here, it was very recent and the memories are fresh and raw. They will not let her wander this place unchallenged. Their scars won’t let them.

Tripitaka, oblivious to the danger but not to her discomfort, studies her for a beat, then says, “Do you think you could eat something?”

A sweet, thoughtful question, born from more compassion than Sandy has ever known in her life. She hates to disappoint him.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea.”

It’s only halfway an answer to the question. She’s not thinking of her appetite or lack thereof — food is just food, sustenance, and she seldom thinks about it more often than her body demands — but of the overcrowded space of a tavern or inn, the air made thick with drink and smoke, drunks with blazing tempers, the walls closing in.

Tripitaka bites his lip. His concern is touching, a still pond on a summer day, the smell of trees and the taste of dewdrops; his fingers flex against her own, reassuring and tender, a flush of pastel blue to balm the blood-haze of this place. It tempers the pains in her chest, soothes the razors running along her throat, and for a too-brief moment Sandy wonders if maybe he does understand her after all.

Then he says, in a voice like wool, “It’s okay if you’re ‘uneasy’,” and she realises he does, but only part of it.

He knows that ‘uneasy’ really means frightened, though of course he’d never make her say it. Possibly he knows, too, that she has been feeling this way from the moment they saw the state of the village gates. He thinks he knows why, too: because she’s afraid of people, because she is mistrustful and wary and does not want to relive her old pain.

He doesn’t understand that her pain is also theirs.

She doesn’t know how to explain it to him, and so she doesn’t try. She just straightens her spine, takes a deep, steadying breath and says, “I’m not ‘uneasy’, Tripitaka.”

Perhaps he senses the deception, perhaps not; either way, he’s graceful enough to ignore it. He leans up, feathering a kiss across her cheek, fleeting and sweet as spun sugar, like this is a perfectly normal thing for a monk to do in broad daylight to a god who looks like a demon, like he doesn’t hear the hisses and growls from the gathering crowd, like he really doesn’t understand.

“Come on,” he whispers, and the pale blue of his voice settles over her like a blanket. “You’ll feel better once we’re inside.”

*

Sandy does not, in fact, feel better once they’re inside.

The inn is the largest building in the village, and the only one left unscathed. It is teeming with people of all kinds, and they all look up in unison as the door crashes open and their strange little party steps in.

It is the same journey of emotions they saw in the crowd outside: surprise, confusion, awe, more surprise, and then—

Sandy’s breath stops in her chest. _No, no, please don’t look, please don’t see, please, please, please..._

Too late. The innkeeper steps out from behind the bar, cracking his knuckles as he looks them — _her_ — up and down. He is massive, his bulging shoulders even brawnier than Pigsy’s, and the glint in his eyes carries no friendliness at all.

“ _You’re_ welcome,” he says to Monkey. “That _thing_ is not.”

Tripitaka, catching scent of what Sandy has been feeling from the start, steps lithely in front of her.

“She’s not a demon,” he says, far too hasty to convince anyone. “She’s harmless.”

That part, of course, is ridiculous. She’s carrying a scythe.

Monkey, being Monkey, ignores the monk’s feint at diplomacy. He seldom has time for such things, even on a good day, and his patience is especially frayed now; the flash of his teeth sends hot, cloying ripples through the air, igniting it in shades of red and yellow and black. This won’t help anyone, Sandy knows, but she’s too paralysed to do anything about it.

“Look,” Monkey snarls, in a voice that tastes of rancid meat. “Where I go, they go. All three of them.”

The anger sharpens on the air. Monkey’s first, then the innkeeper’s, and then everyone else’s. Three of the more intoxicated patrons stand up, swaying under the effect of too much drink, fists clenching and muscles rippling. The blood-flavoured tang in Sandy’s mouth intensifies until she’s almost choking on it, until she’s certain it will make her sick if she doesn’t get out of here. She is terrified of its weight, pulses of red closing in on her, tight as the walls, pressing and pressing and—

Her stomach is in her mouth. She swallows it down and struggles to find her voice.

“Please.” It’s a whisper, hoarse and hopeless, aimed not at Monkey but at Tripitaka; they all know that a word from him will stop even the Monkey King. “Not this, not now. Please, don’t...”

 _Please don’t let him make a scene_ , she wants to say. _Please don’t let him make them even more angry than they already are. Please, please, please, don’t let him make me visible_.

They’ve been within the village bounds for just a few short minutes, and already she feels flayed and razed and burned alive. These people are in the most unspeakable pain; it’s not their fault she looks like a monster, no more than it is her fault that they’re angry and upset, that her demon-like face makes them remember the horrors they’ve suffered at the hands of actual ones. It is no-one’s fault, the blood-heat in the air, the violence in those cracking knuckles and bared fists, but so it is nonetheless.

Finally grasping how dangerous this is, Tripitaka clears his throat.

“We don’t want any trouble,” he says.

His voice is high and lilting; it tempers the blood and replaces it with the scent of pollen, the taste of nectar. Sandy gulps it down, struggling to catch her breath. “Thank you.”

“Yeah.” He turns his body halfway towards her, keeping his eyes on the innkeeper and his friends. “You stay here,” he says to Monkey and Pigsy. “We’ll find somewhere else.”

Monkey is aghast. Sandy is even more so. “No,” she says, with more firmness than she feels inside herself. “You stay with them. Eat, drink, rest. I’ll go where I go best.”

She means the shadows, she means the sewers. She means the darkest corners this village has to offer, the places full of poison and rot, the skittering cracks and crevices that are the only home she’s ever known.

It will be a blessing, she thinks sadly. She needs to block out all this noise, the screaming colour of too many people, the blood-tang of too much anger and fear, sickening and noxious and squeezing the breath out of her lungs. It cracks through her vision like the lightning-strike distortion of a fever headache, settles sourly in her stomach, sets fire to all her senses at once, and she needs to get away, for their sake and for her own.

She needs to go, she needs to leave. She needs to be alone.

But that word — _alone_ — means something vividly and viscerally different to Tripitaka. To Sandy, a god who is terrified of people, it is like a cool cloth balming a fever; to Tripitaka, a young human who has lost his only family, it is a horror, a terror, a nightmare. Of course he would look at her with sympathy, of course he would want to protect her from this thing he is so afraid of. Of course he would say—

“I’m coming with you.”

Sandy moans. “Please, don’t.”

His eyes gleam under the dim light; they pierce her like twin needles, the kind meant for stitching up wounds.

“I don’t want you wandering off alone,” he says. “Not here. If you want to...” He pauses, the word ‘hide’ hanging unspoken between them, ice-white and tasting of sugar, in the moment before he changes tack. “If these people don’t want your company, I’ll take it.”

He’s making a point, Sandy realises, and one not directed at her. His words, typically blunt, cut as keenly as the edge of her scythe. He is telling them — _these people_ , with all their anger and hurt — that she really is harmless; he is telling them this as a monk, a scholar and a holy man, and he is telling them that her company is something worth having.

It is a lie, and Sandy doesn’t need to taste the blood filling the air once more to know that they know it too.

*

She does not hide in the sewers like she wants.

She can’t, not with Tripitaka by her side. She won’t expose him to that, won’t force him to know first-hand the places where she is most comfortable. He sees something close to human in her, something he claims is like him; if she exposes him to the things that make her feel safe, he will know beyond all doubt that it was never there.

So, instead, she hides behind the inn, in a shadowy alley reeking of sickness. It is not home, is not safe, but it is as close as she can hope for with him there to see it. The squeak of rats paints the air in familiar colours, soft greys and warm browns, and Sandy closes her eyes, draws her knees up to her chest, and listens and smells and tastes what meagre comfort her fractured mind still understands.

“I’m sorry,” Tripitaka says. He sounds a little far away, no doubt keeping a distance for her sake, but the words still carry, thick as honey and just as sweet. “I didn’t know they’d react so strongly to you.”

Sandy swallows down the saccharine flavour of his voice, lets it warm her belly. “I did.”

She opens her eyes to find him gazing at her with a deep, azure-tinted sadness. His emotions are so soft most of the time, pale blues and pastel pinks, it is strange to see him feeling things so intensely. The vividness makes her want to flinch and hide from him; she is still so raw from the heat and pain of the inn, it’s almost more than she can bear just to see his face. But a part of her wants to go to him as well, to move in closer, to soothe his dark colours until they’re soft again, until he is softer too. She feels so much, and it is so hard.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, lower but not gentler. “I think I understand now, why you’re so...”

Sandy chuckles weakly; she’s shaking all over and can’t seem to stop. “Uneasy?”

“Scared.” His voice is strong, unashamed. It cuts through the rotten air like a mouthful of exotic spices. “Frightened.”

“No.” She tries to shake her head, but her body won’t obey; she is frozen, trapped by his eyes. “They were human. I am a god who looks like a demon. _They_ were the ones who were frightened.”

Perhaps if she says it firmly enough, one of them will believe it. Perhaps if she—

Apparently not. Tripitaka shoots her a look, decisive and cynical, that cuts through the lie like it was made of parchment.

“They were _angry_ ,” he corrects, and the word floods Sandy’s senses with the same too-much sensation she felt inside the inn, blood on her tongue, fire filling her lungs, the smell of death and pain and fury. “The people here... they’ve moved past frightened. They’re just angry.”

Sandy doesn’t try to deny it. She clenches her fists, digs her nails into her palms and tries to focus on the bite of discomfort, a tiny pain, but one that she can control.

“Of course they are,” she says. “Look around you, Tripitaka. See what has been done to this village.” She pauses, not for him but for herself; she can’t catch her breath. “These people have lost their lives, their homes. No doubt some have lost their families as well. They have lost _everything_ at the hands of monsters like me.”

Tripitaka steps back, reeling and suddenly tearful. “Monsters that _look_ like you.”

“It’s the same thing.”

In their eyes, at least, it’s true. In her own too, most of the time. But Tripitaka doesn’t want to hear that, of course; the look on his face is enough to crush her heart in her chest.

“It’s _not_ the same thing.” His eyes are blazing, not the blood-heat of Monkey’s anger, or of the villagers’, but a gentler kind, like holding her hands over a campfire, feeling the flames lick at her skin, the first touch of warmth they’ve felt all day; it still burns, but the pain is sweeter. “You’re not a demon, Sandy. These people are wrong to hate you just because you look like one.”

“I know that.” She breathes slowly, unhappily. The flame of Tripitaka’s passion burns away the poison and rot of this place, and it makes her feel exposed all over again. “But knowing they’re wrong doesn’t make them any smaller.”

Tripitaka frowns. “They’re human. You’re a god. They can’t hurt you.”

It is such a simple thing to say, to believe. His conviction shakes her heart, makes it ripple like disturbed water; it makes her think of a cavern behind a waterfall, of the exotic, overwhelming taste of a flower she’s never seen before, of the word _gift_ and his arms around her waist, his lips pressed against her cheek, of his kindness and his warmth and all the tiny ways he’s unlike any boy, any monk, any human she’s ever known.

“You’re human,” she says very quietly, a gentle reminder for them both. “You know that’s not true.”

What she means, what she’ll never, ever say, is: _you’re human, and you could raze me to the ground._

He studies her for a long moment, dark eyes sparkling in the darker shadows. They remind her of the sky at night, peppered with stars, endless and open and so vast. She wonders if he knows that she’s still terrified of it.

Finally, looking lost and sad, he closes the space between them and sits down next to her. “I know it _is_ true,” he says, in a voice that smells of freshly cut grass. “But I also understand why you feel like it might not be. Why their anger might... why you might feel—”

“I am _not_ frightened.” It’s pointless to lie, she knows, but Tripitaka is right: she is a god, and she has no right or reason to feel this way. “Let them hurt me if they want to, I don’t care.”

“Sandy.”

He’s chiding her, a little, but it’s tempered by the touch of his hand. He covers hers briefly, fingertips applying the faintest pressure to the backs of her knuckles, then he moves up to cup her neck, resting his thumb purposefully against her pulse-point. Chiding, definitely, but he’s grounding her too; the contact tickles like insects skittering over her tongue and down her throat, but the name slides across her skin like satin, smooth and soft and delicious.

She swallows the sensation, tries to focus on the pale blue of his compassion, his warmth, his everything.

“I don’t belong here,” she mumbles. “In places like this.”

“You belong with _us_.” His vehemence sharpens the blue, a lightning-flash of cyan that cracks the air and makes it cold. “You belong with—”

He doesn’t get the chance to finish.

A shift in the air, turning the rot to citrus, sharp, twisting it into something dangerous and still alive. Sandy is up on her feet almost before she’s processed the sensation, scythe in front of her, teeth bared. She is a knife-edge, honed and sharpened, keying in to the crunch of boots on gravel, the weight of footsteps, the heavy breathing, uneven and ragged, the reek of ale and wine and _human_.

“Demon!”

One of the tavern’s patrons, massive in all directions, his clenched fists nearly as big as Tripitaka’s head. His two friends swagger along behind him, less big but no less frightening; the glint of danger in their eyes sweeps through the alley like a spotlight, illuminating and revealing; it brushes away the shadows like they’re nothing at all, leaving her exposed and open and visible, leaving her vulnerable.

Tripitaka jumps up to his feet, stepping in front of her like he did in the inn.

“I told you,” he says, with his usual gentle diplomacy, “she’s not a demon.”

His voice rings like a bell, delicate and beautiful and too clean for a place as filthy as this; it fills Sandy’s mind with ice crystals, water so cold it makes her tongue numb, makes her head want to burst. It makes her feel safe and unsafe at the same time, a chill wrapping itself around her, like her home in the sewers and the awful illnesses that came in the winter; it seizes her bones, rattles them until her whole body is shaking, shaking, shaking.

“Tripitaka.” Her voice is shaking too, raspy and hoarse, but she will not admit she’s frightened. “Stay behind me.”

Tripitaka doesn’t retreat, doesn’t even turn around. His courage is a flame: it scorches the ice, the chills and the seizures, burning up everything in its path, and Sandy is a little bit afraid of him too, this tiny little human so alive and so powerful, his presence like a creature from myth. He is so small, so fragile, but somehow he takes up every atom of space in this cramped, too-crowded place.

“She’s not a demon,” he says again. “She’s a god. Like Monkey. You have my word: she won’t do you any harm.”

There is a shift in the air; it thickens, heaves, turning again to blood in Sandy’s mouth. It seethes, a creeping virus under the skin of the other humans, the anger, the rising temper, violence waiting to be unleashed. This isn’t what they want to hear, not what they want to believe, and that makes them angrier, more dangerous.

_How dare this little thing tell us that what we see is wrong?_

They hate her, resent her face, her body, despise all the things they think she represents, but perhaps they’re a little frightened of her too, because all of a sudden none of that violence is aimed at her. They survived, like she did, but they learned too, just how much pain their imagined enemy can inflict: Sandy is dangerous, she’s a monster, she could hurt them if they come too close... but Tripitaka is human, weak and mortal like them, and he’s not nearly so much of a threat.

Sandy knows what this means. She knows—

“Tripitaka.” For him, she makes her voice strong. “Get behind me. _Now_.”

He doesn’t move.

But the others do.

They step forward, the big one first, shadowed by his friends, and their eyes glow with a very different kind of fire. In Tripitaka, it cleanses and balms and purifies, the perfect blinding white of courage and strength; in them it only burns, hotter and hotter, fuelled by fury and fear and frustration, devouring everything around it, destructive and deadly, until even Tripitaka’s courage begins to falter, until _his_ fire, radiant and beautiful, begins to dim.

“What would you know?” their leader growls at him. “A stupid boy like you. Probably not even a real monk.”

Tripitaka’s shoulders go very tight. Sandy’s heart, trembling like a child behind her ribs, aches for him.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he whispers, in a strained, tremulous voice. “You don’t understand...”

That’s all he can manage, though. His voice fails him, shattering into a thousand shards of glass and ice, multicoloured and dazzling, each one reflecting something new, something intangible refracted and reflected and razed raw. He sounds so delicate, so fragile; he sounds like the shape of his body, small and waifish and too easily broken. He is shaking as hard as Sandy, and for the first time since they met he looks very, very afraid.

The day they met, Sandy put her weapon to his throat. She threatened his life, and he did not flinch at all.

But here he is, shaking and scared and so _small_ , and the blood in Sandy’s mouth is so thick, so rancid, so completely overwhelming that she can’t move her tongue, can’t swallow it down, can’t—

One of the others steps forward, scenting weakness. “Not much of a boy, either,” he sneers, keen eyes roving Tripitaka’s tiny body. “Maybe _he’s_ a demon, too.”

He takes another step, and then another, eyes dark with threat, fists balled with menace, with anger, with _hate_ , and Sandy knows where this path leads, she’s walked it, she’s lived it, she’s woken up dazed and bloodied on the other side of it, she knows, she _knows_ , she—

Tripitaka makes a small, terrified noise, like maybe he knows too. Sandy’s heart cracks, too-hot steel struck by a rock, by a fist, by a name, and she is frightened too but he is worse, he is weak, he is _Tripitaka_ , and Sandy—

Sandy lunges.

She has no memory of moving, only of the blood in her mouth as she pins the human to the ground, knees squeezing his ribs, scythe pressed to his throat, snarling like the wild, feral thing they always said she was.

“Touch him,” she growls, “and I will _show_ you a demon.”

He’s gasping, unable to breathe. She’s probably squeezing him too hard. She doesn’t care; she squeezes harder.

The blood is in the air now, too, thick and heavy. It fills her lungs, fills her vision, fills every part of her and spills out in a snarl. Shaking her head, she finds she doesn’t particularly care about that either.

Behind her now, safe and protected, Tripitaka whispers, “Sandy.”

His voice tastes like green apples, smells like salt, sounds like pain, and it does not break through to her at all.

Sandy isn’t breathing. She can’t. She is frightened and she is wild and crazy and halfway blind, and she did not want any of this. She didn’t want them to hate her, didn’t want them to be angry with her, didn’t want them to be out here, in the shadows, in her _home_ , attacking the one person who made her better, twisting her mind and her thoughts until she forgets what she is, until even his voice, the most beautiful voice in all the world, isn’t enough to—

To—

Between her knees, she feels something snap inside the human’s chest. She listens to the gurgle of his breath as he chokes in pain, a sound like rotten fish that churns in her belly, makes her feel sick. She tightens her grip a little more, and she leans in too close, and she lets her old animal self stretch its limbs, surging like the rising tide, unstoppable and deadly.

“Say what you will to me,” she snarls. “ _Do_ what you will. I’m no demon, but I will take your punishments if you wish it, and never raise a hand against you. But if you touch that monk, I will destroy you. I will make you _wish_ for the demons who tore this place apart.”

She stands. Her legs feel like water; she doesn’t know how they’re keeping her upright. A hand, small and slim and shaking, finds her wrist and holds on tight.

“That’s enough, Sandy.”

Her vision is blurred, tinted with red, black, white. She watches as her prey staggers to its feet, as it turns and runs back into the light, back where it’s safe, the other two following in hot pursuit. She thinks she hears them shouting, but she can’t make out the words. She can’t make out anything.

She still feels sick. Viscerally, violently, it’s all she can taste: nausea and blood. It’s all hers now, the blood, the nausea, even the violence, the throbbing in her head that comes sometimes in the dark, when she’s fallen too deep into the monster she was never meant to be. She doesn’t know if she’s crossed a line; if she has, she doesn’t particularly care.

“They frightened you,” she rasps, turning around very slowly. Tripitaka is hazy, a pale-blue phantom shimmering against a backdrop of charred, bloody bones. “They would have hurt you. They... I...”

He squeezes her wrist. She’s sure she can feel the bones in his fingers, thread-thin and delicate. Human bones, but not like theirs; she would break her own to keep his whole.

She remembers that now. She remembers _him_ , and as she slowly crawls back to herself, dizzy and sick, she tries to hold on to the things that matter: snow and butter melting on her tongue, pale blue washing away the red and the black, balming and beautiful.

“Sandy,” he says again. “Sandy, I...”

He is shaking all over. His body, his voice, even his eyes, trembling with tears. He looks drained and broken. Violated, maybe, like one of them got their hands on him after all.

“I’m not sorry,” Sandy says hoarsely. “They frightened you and they accused you of the most dreadful things, and I will not apologise for making them regret it.”

He pulls away, then, sharp and sudden, and the fear and pain in his eyes hardens to something new, something she doesn’t recognise at all. He’s not angry, at least not any kind of anger she recognises, but suddenly he looks more like _them_ than himself. It makes her flinch a little, makes her own terror swim back to the surface, and she slinks away from him, back into the shadows, feeling wounded inside and not really knowing why.

“Was it really so dreadful?” he asks, after a long, tense moment.

Sandy doesn’t understand the question.

“They frightened you,” she says, for the third time. “Yes, it was dreadful.”

“Not that.” There are new colours in his voice now, forest greens and winter greys. “What they said to me. Their... accusations.”

Sandy takes a moment to remember. _Probably not even a real monk,_ one of them said. _Not much of a boy either. Maybe he’s a demon too. Maybe he—_

She closes her eyes. Swallowing the words down is like fighting back a wave of vertigo.

“I’ve lived with those ‘accusations’ all my life,” she says aloud. Giving the horror a voice strips it of some of its power, allows her room to breathe. “I’m a demon or a monster, I must be killed or hunted or worse. You saw how the people of this village responded to me. You saw the life I lived before you appeared to pull me out.” Her stomach clenches, determination tightening the muscle to solid steel. “I will not have you exposed to those things, Tripitaka. I will _not_. You are too—”

“Too what?” Tripitaka blurts out, looking utterly devastated. “Too much of a _monk_? Too much of a _boy_?”

The outburst comes from nowhere, and so does the horror in his voice. She blinks, dazed and dizzied, feeling like she’s taken a blow to the head, coming around to find the world turned upside-down. Stars flash behind her eyes, splitting the air into shards of glass, and for a moment she can only reel.

“Nothing like that,” she manages after a moment, still shaking off the disorientation. “Why would you—”

“Then what?” The devastation has softened, but only a little; all of a sudden, he sounds desperate. “Too _what_?”

Sandy blinks at him, but knows now not to ask. “Too _good_ ,” she says instead. “Too _kind_. Too...”

Her skin prickles and burns. She is blushing and embarrassed, and she can’t bring herself to finish: _Too beautiful_.

Tripitaka blinks, wide-eyed and vulnerable. He’s flushing too, like he doesn’t know what to say. “Oh.”

It is a simple word, fragile and very small, but it fills the air with little lights, pale blue like he is, dancing and dreamy, so lovely that they chase away all the dizziness, all the confusion, even the lingering taste of blood.

“Let them say what they will about your robes,” Sandy goes on, emboldened by the colours, the life blooming in him again at last. “Or about what you look like under them. I don’t care what they think about _who_ you are, Tripitaka. But they will not make false claims about _what_ you are. They will not call you a demon. They will not make you into a monster. They will not do to you what—”

 _—what they did to me,_ her aching heart won’t let her say.

She doesn’t realise she’s started crying, not until Tripitaka reaches up and pulls her into a hug. His arms are so small next to her lean, lanky body, but he holds her so gently and so fiercely at the same time, so passionately that she’s sure they could swallow her completely. His embrace is a fluttering, beautiful thing, just like he is, but there is so much power inside him, so much courage and strength, and even though Sandy is a god and he’s only a human, somehow she is the one who feels protected.

“Sandy,” he whispers, and her name is so many words.

“You are good,” she breathes, ducking her head, burying her face in his scarf, drowning in the beautiful, dawn-tinted blue. “Whatever you are, whatever you’re not, you are good.”

Tripitaka is crying too, when she pulls away. Only a little bit, but the tears on his face reflect hers, crystalline and delicate, and her breath stutters reverently in her chest.

She’s never seen a monk cry before. She’s never seen a _human_ cry before. It was unfathomable that one might get close enough to let her see it, to let her reach up and touch his face, ghost her fingertips across his cheek, brush away the tears as they fall, brush away the thousand little images of her own face, pale and spectral and so much like a demon.

“Thank you,” Tripitaka whispers, turning his head to press a chaste, fluttering kiss to her palm. “Thank you.”

“I...” Sandy’s skin feels like it’s burning but her insides are wracked with chills; she doesn’t want to let go but the shuddering in her chest is so unsettling. “You should go back to the others. It’s safer with them.”

Tripitaka leans back a bit, studying her face like it’s a lens for the words, a mirror for the unpleasant truth he doesn’t want to acknowledge but cannot deny.

“They won’t come back,” he says, in the rough, charcoal-flavoured voice that says he’s trying to convince himself more than her. “You scared them half to death. I think you might have broken his ribs. They’d be stupid to try again.”

Sandy shakes her head. “This village has felt a demon’s hand around its throat before,” she reminds him, not as gently as she’d like. “It knows the danger of letting one wander about unchecked. They’re more likely to come back now they’ve seen I’m willing to hurt them. They’ll bring others, maybe weapons, and I...” She closes her eyes, flooded by memories of a thousand encounters just like that. “I don’t want you to be there when they do. I don’t want you to see...”

 _I don’t want you to see what they would do to me,_ she doesn’t say. And she definitely doesn’t say, _I don’t want you to see what I might have to do to them._

Tripitaka bows his head. He understands, she can tell, and he desperately wishes he didn’t.

“I thought I could protect you,” he says sadly. “I thought I could make them see. I thought it would calm them down, at least, hearing it from...” He winces, pale blue blanching to ash. “From someone who looks like me.”

It is an odd choice of words. Sandy knows better than anyone the nuance there, the vast differences between looking like something and actually being so. She is no demon; it may not matter to the hurt and broken people of this village, determined as they are to hate her for the monster she resembles, but it does matter to her. She has held that truth tight to her chest all her life, the only comfort she had for so long: _I am not what you see, I am not what you believe_.

“Life has taught me this well,” she says quietly, to Tripitaka. “People will see the thing they want, no matter the reality. If they’ve decided that I’m a demon, they would sooner convince themselves that you’re not a monk than accept that you and I both speak the truth.”

She means, _I’m doomed, but you don’t have to be._ She means, _distance yourself from me now, and they will see you again as the beautiful, radiant soul you are_.

Perhaps Tripitaka hears that. Perhaps he doesn’t. But he looks up at her with such pain and warmth, and he touches her face with such unfathomable softness that her heart stutters and stalls and stops inside her chest.

“I want to be here,” he says. “I want to stay with you.”

Sandy falters. No-one has ever said that to her before.

“They’ll hurt you because of me,” she whispers, feeling small and scared and so unworthy. “They’ll hurt you, they’ll go after you again, they’ll _accuse_ you—”

“They won’t hurt me if I stay behind you.” He is so sure of that, so utterly convinced that she can keep him safe. His faith, pale blue and beautiful, strikes her right between the eyes and leaves her blind. “As for their accusations...”

He pauses, a silence that seems to stretch out for a very long time. Sandy wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to endure such things for her sake, that she is undeserving of such a sacrifice, but his touches warm her skin so wonderfully, balming her against the cold and the loneliness, the familiar rot of these shadow-hidden corners, and his eyes are dancing with light that doesn’t burn, and he is so much more than his delicate bones and his softness, so much more than a monk or a boy or a human, so much—

So _much_.

“Tripitaka,” she whispers, and she doesn’t know what else to say, only that it is so important, that he has to know their accusations don’t matter, that they can’t take away the beautiful blue of who he is.

His eyes gleam as he looks up at her. The face she sees reflected is tearful and awestruck and looks nothing at all like a demon. Sandy can hardly believe it’s hers.

“You’ve lived with their accusations your whole life,” he continues at last, pressing the rhythm of the words into her skin with the backs of his fingers. “I can live with them for one night.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Sandy rasps. “You shouldn’t...”

Tripitaka’s thumb catches the corner of her mouth, holds there until she stops talking, stops shaking, stops breathing.

“Neither should you,” he says. “But here we are.”

The contact makes her dizzy, the words even more so. She has never felt so seen, or so present, and she has to close her eyes for fear of drowning in it.

“Here we are,” she echoes. “Let them say what they want. They can’t make us something we’re not.”

Tripitaka’s hand falls from her face. He finds hers instead, trembling but powerful, and holds on tight.

“Not here,” he says, to her and to himself as well. “Not tonight.”

He smiles up at her, then, secret and shaky, and the blue shifts to a softer grey, to the open sky before a heavy rain, to the promise of water hiding in the endless dark, sorrowful and shadow-touched and so, so sweet.

Sandy swallows hard, summons her strength, and smiles back.

**


	4. When We Recovered

**

A god can survive, with ease, a great many things that a human or a demon could not.

That doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.

Sandy knows this from experience. Broken bones, crushed limbs, concussions. Coughing up blood, shivering with fever, illness and infection and worse things besides. They are not fatal, not even particularly dangerous, even to a little wisp of a god like her, but in the middle of the night, alone with the sound of her own moans... yes, they hurt.

It is not the middle of the night now, and she has far more pleasant company than the clenching of her teeth.

That should be a comfort. She knows it should.

But she has lived too long in the dark to see the light as something warm, and it is not safe to let her teeth clench in a place where someone else might see.

She is, apparently, the only one who feels this way.

Monkey is massaging his shoulder, stretching and muttering sourly under his breath. “Even demons get lucky sometimes,” he gripes, with a scowl that dares anyone to disagree. Moody and irritable, his voice tight with pain, he seems wholly unashamed of what it means.

Pigsy, grimacing but otherwise cheerful, is prodding gingerly at the back of his head. “What’s one more concussion, eh?” he shrugs, more to himself than anyone else.

Sandy doesn’t understand how they can be so open about these things, how they can speak their discomfort aloud, expose their suffering so thoughtlessly to anyone who might hear, daubing the air with the dull reds and hazy black of pain and misery, transforming it into shades of living colour right there for all the world to exploit.

Don’t they see that it makes them vulnerable? Don’t they understand that it makes them easy prey?

Tripitaka, unharmed and untouched by the scars of battle, is fussing over Monkey. Understandable; it’s probably the first time he’s seen a crack in the super-god’s armour. Maybe he thought Monkey couldn’t be harmed, maybe he thought he really was untouchable by anything except the crown sutra. Possibly he just doesn’t like to see his hero feeling less than wonderful.

Whatever the reason, Sandy is grateful. If his attention is on Monkey, perhaps he won’t notice that she—

“Hey!”

But apparently Monkey doesn’t want to be the centre of attention either. Expert that he is in deflection, he waves a deft hand, drawing every eye towards her instead, like a magician using sleight-of-hand.

Shrinking down as small as she can get, Sandy mutters, “Go away.”

Monkey, of course, does no such thing. “Still breathing over there?”

She glares. “Of course.”

“You sure? That demon stomped you pretty hard.” He turns back to Tripitaka, disentangling himself effortlessly from the monk’s fretting hands. “Maybe you should go and bother her instead. You know, to be sure?”

Tripitaka turns, one eyebrow raised as he takes in the way she’s sitting, shoulders hunched, protecting her midsection. “Maybe...”

“No.” She huddles further into her cloak, making herself even smaller, trying as best she can to ignore the way it hurts to breathe, little lightning-bolts of misery lashing out on every inhale. “And he didn’t _stomp_ me.”

Monkey is smirking now, clearly glad to see the pity party turned away from himself. “Stomped you like a _bug_.”

It’s not as much hyperbole as Sandy would like. She remembers very little from the fight — as always, the details are lost to time and recovery, drowned by the dim ocean-spray haze of instinct and action, reflex and movement and water — but some things she recalls entirely too well: the taste of grass and dirt as she hit the ground, the blurred browns and greens of vertigo, the shadow of the demon’s boot as he stood over her, the _crack_ as he drove it into her ribs, once and then again.

She remember, rather less vividly, the scene that came next. The quicksilver gleam of her scythe, the body dissolving to dust, the silence filling her head, heavy like the scent of wine from a tavern. The demon was dead in half the time it took him to strike her down and beat her breathless: a blink and a flash, and she was back on her feet, triumphant.

The thrill of victory has long since faded. It hardly seems fair that the pain is what remains.

Dragging herself back to the present, to the now-pain — only fractionally duller than the then-pain — she catches Pigsy rolling his eyes at Monkey. His laughter, rich and sticky like too much cake, makes her feel smothered and protected at the same time.

“This from the god who cried when I shoved his shoulder back into its socket,” he remarks, winking over his shoulder at Sandy. “A fine one to talk about getting stomped, you are.”

“I didn’t _cry_ ,” Monkey shoots back, spluttering manfully.

Sandy tries to smirk, but it doesn’t work; her teeth still want to clench.

“Exactly,” she says instead. “And _I_ didn’t get stomped.”

She stands, then, summoning all her strength to keep from touching her battered ribs. It hurts quite horribly, but she’s not safe here and she won’t let them see it. Can’t let them see it, can’t let anyone see anything. Monkey can afford to let his injuries show; he is powerful, he is relentless, he is unstoppable. Pigsy doesn’t care what people think of him; he wears his weaknesses like a badge of pride and honour. Sandy is nothing like them, and she has learned too many times what happens when her pain is on display.

She has to get out of here. She has to get out of here _now_ , before her teeth start to clench, before her body bows and bends, before they can see—

“Sandy?” Tripitaka is watching her, a frown creasing his brow. Sandy smells fresh cherries, tastes crushed ones. “Are you—”

“Going for a walk.” Her limbs weigh too much, her body is sluggish and lazy. She feels like snow turning to ice, smothered beneath its own weight. “Is that okay?”

He looks like he wants to refuse, conflict pouring syrup-sweet across his features, but he refrains, swallowing the urge before the protest can take shape. No doubt he knows her too well by now, and sees that it would be pointless; when one of his gods wants to do something, there is not much that he, or any of the others, can do to talk them out of it.

“Sure,” he sighs, with a reluctance that lodges bone-fine in Sandy’s throat. “But be careful?”

“Always,” she promises, and turns away before he can see the way her jaw has gone white.

*

They’ve made their camp at the edge of a scenic, coastal cliff.

The tang of salt in the air is soothing all on its own, transforming the golden red of sunset into something paler, fresh cold milk flowing across the horizon, a homely sort of flavour that Sandy can swallow and keep down. It guides her down the cliff face, helps her to find the place where the rock has been weathered and worn, dozens of little cracks and crevices, perfect for slipping inside, perfect for disappearing.

It is the most wondrous relief, always, being able to hide.

It is even more of one, now, doing it when she is in pain.

She knows it won’t last. Can’t last. This is another lesson she’s learned again and again in the weeks since Tripitaka brought her out of the shadows: the light has a way of creeping in through even the smallest cracks, of shining its summer-sounding warmth right into her face, whether she wants it to or not.

Solitude, once the only kind of life she knew, has now become a luxury, something she can’t afford to take for granted. They will come for her eventually, one or all of them, either because they’re worried or because she’s been gone too long and they’ve run out of patience. Not even Tripitaka truly understands how much she needs this, how precious and important it is to be _alone_.

Curled up inside a crack in the stone, alone and hidden and safely out of sight, she lets the pain wash over her. It tightens her jaw, escapes from her throat in whimpers and moans, spills out of her unfettered and unhindered, and she sits back and lets it happen.

It’s safe in here. Safe to let it happen, safe to feel it, to hurt and groan and clench her jaw, to do whatever it takes to ride it out. Private, protected, safe. She can close her eyes and breathe through the worst of it, the throbbing pulses and lightning-strikes, the garish colours, orange and red and yellow thrumming like the sunset behind her eyes. She can be in pain, and know that no-one can see.

For a time, a short time that is hers and hers alone, she hides herself away and doesn’t have to hide her pain as well. For a time—

And then it’s over.

Too soon, much too soon. A thundercrack that charges the air, just as bright and garish as the ones striking between her ribs, just as loud, just as dizzying, tasting just as much of blood, and then it’s over: her precious, perfect solitude blasted away like so much dust.

She doesn’t know how much time she had, only that it feels entirely too short. No doubt it was longer than she thinks — they wouldn’t waste their time tracking her down after only a few minutes, not when she hides herself so well — but even so it’s not nearly enough. The pain is still there, kicking at her lungs, her chest, kicking and kicking and _hurting_ , and it’s not lessened enough for her to cover it up when they—

When _he_ —

“Sandy?”

Her breath stops, instinctive and automatic. It sends a burst of pain through her ribs so sharp, so unbearable that she can’t even try to hide the groan that wrenches out of her, shaping the syllables of his name.

“Tripitaka.”

She’s tucked herself into the tiniest crack she could find, the faintest little imperfection in the rock face, but still he finds a way to wriggle inside too, to join her and banish the last of her solitude with a weary smile.

“You really should leave a trail or something,” he sighs.

Sandy bristles. It sends a burst of pain through her chest, which she drives back through sheer stubbornness. “I don’t think you understand the concept of hiding.”

His smile grows easier, more radiant; it is fading sunlight glinting over a distant shore, honey spread over her tongue, the smell of summer after it rains. It makes her feel sheltered and vulnerable at once, the disquietude of knowing that feeling safe usually means she’s not.

“I understand the concept,” he counters gently. “But I think you’re a little too good at it.”

Sandy certainly hopes that’s true. She’s spent her whole life honing this particular talent, and she has no intention of letting it lapse now, no matter how many people deign to call her ‘friend’.

“If I weren’t,” she points out, “I wouldn’t have survived long enough to join the quest in the first place. To say nothing of saving your life today, for the—”

She pauses, trying and failing to calculate.

Tripitaka winces, the smile falling miserably off his face. “—third time,” he finishes with a grimace. “This week.”

“Mm.” She does not touch her ribs. She will not let him see. “So it’s as much for your benefit, that I hide so well, as it is for mine. Yes?”

“I don’t know about that,” he says, sighing again. “I think I aged twenty years climbing down that cliff.”

Sandy chews the inside of her cheek; it does nothing to distract her from the throbbing of her ribs. “Sorry.”

Catching the discomfort on her face, Tripitaka’s expression shifts. It is still beautiful, but a little overwhelming now as well, a blending of all the colours on the air, rainbow glitter suspended in shafts of dying sunlight; Sandy feels captivated, and captured.

“Is it bad?” he asks, very softly.

Sandy refuses to clench her jaw. “Don’t know what you’re—”

“Sandy.” His eyes flash a warning, a lightning-bolt that strikes like the worst of the pain. “You’re _hiding_.”

“I hide often.” She braces her hands on the ground, holds herself still and defiant. “This is nothing new.”

“You hide when you’re ‘uneasy’.” He says the world so naturally, so comfortably, letting the harder truth — _frightened_ — hang unspoken between them. She hates that he knows her well enough to do this, that he understands her so intimately. No-one ever has before. “Or when you’re in pain.”

“I...” She sighs, then shakes her head. “No. It’s not bad.”

It is not a surprise that he doesn’t believe her. Sandy hardly believes it herself, and she knows that it’s true.

“Can I see?”

She hesitates, for more than the obvious reason. She hesitates, of course, because it is in her blood and bones to resist exposing her weaknesses, because she has lived her life this way for more years than anyone could be expected to remember: this, the obvious reason. But she hesitates too because of the look on his face, soft but hard, assessing but compassionate. He’s annoyed with her for hiding, but he understands as well, why she felt the need to do so, and that is so, so terrifying.

She gives in, of course. He could ask her to turn herself inside-out and she would only need the time to figure out how; he could ask her to do anything in the world, no matter how difficult, and she would find a way. But giving in comes hard to her right now, vulnerable as she is, and when she does it’s with her head bowed and her eyes shrouded in shadow. She will obey, as she always does, but there are moments of discomfort so profound that she can only survive them if she pretends she’s still hidden.

It is difficult — it is always difficult, it is _necessarily_ difficult — to peel away the layers of her clothing, her cloak and her belt and the tatters of her shirt, to reveal her torso. She doesn’t like to be like this, without her knife about her person, without her cloak on hand to pull across her shoulders or her hips or whatever other part of her that people might think to stare at. It is unsettling, being here with _him_ , revealing her body piece by piece, her ribs jutting starvation-thin and bruised deep purple.

She has disrobed many times, of course, to bathe or to swim or to wash her clothes. This is very, very different.

It is only her ribs, she tells herself. Only the place that shields her heart, bruised and battered and exposed for all the world to see. It’s only his eyes — _Tripitaka’s_ eyes — roaming the surface of her skin like a wanderer, like a hunter tracking his prey, like a—

Certainly not like a monk.

Sandy whines, feeling ravaged and flayed. She fumbles for her cloak, desperate and blind and silently hating herself, but Tripitaka stops her before she can pull it back on. His hand is heavy on her wrist, flowers blooming between them, the heady smell of perfume, a colourburst of pink and white.

“It’s not bad,” she croaks again, helpless and scared. “It’s not. Please don’t...”

He does. Perhaps he doesn’t hear her — she can barely get the words out at all, much less make them audible — or perhaps he just can’t help himself. He reaches out, careful and tentative, letting his fingertips brush across her skin like the whisper of a kiss, finding the source of the pain as if it were his own.

His skin is much darker than hers, even with the bruises staining her torso like spilled ink. Most people seem dark next to her, but the contrast is especially stark now, the colours turning to flavours in her mouth, clashing like a dozen different spices all at once.

“It doesn’t look as bad as Monkey’s shoulder, at least,” he muses, and Sandy relaxes slightly. He believes her now, at least a little way. “Does it hurt to breathe?”

Sandy opens her mouth. _No, of course not. No, it’s fine. No, I barely feel anything at all. Don’t worry._

“Yes,” she hears herself say, and all of a sudden her vision is blurred and everything tastes of salted fish. “Yes, it does.”

With the way he’s touching her, fingertips like little butterflies across her ribs, the gentlest pressure on her heart, he is close enough to give away his responses: his pulse stutters, a flow of pain between them, bitter as green apples, sweet as strawberry jam.

“Oh,” he says in a whisper.

“It’s not bad,” Sandy says again, hiding her face. “It’s really not.”

She hears him swallow, feels him tense. “Is anything broken?”

“No.” She says it without hesitation, no need to think or check. She hopes he doesn’t realise what that means, the intimate familiarity with her own body in various states of injury, that she can answer so quickly and so effortlessly. “Only bruises. Deep, but not bad. His boots were strong, but his foot was not.”

Tripitaka musters a weak chuckle. “That’s good.”

Sandy tries to swallow. It’s like trying to force a rock down her throat, jagged and heavy and much too big, and for a moment it’s all she can do to keep from choking on it.

She holds her breath, holds her body in perfect stillness, so Tripitaka won’t have to feel the pain as it hits, so he won’t have to soften his face into that impossible, unbearable empathy, filling the air with his paintbrushed pastels, colours she can’t endure, colours that both burn and balm.

“Gods heal very swiftly,” she reminds him, when she‘s sure she can speak with some measure of control. “And I’m especially good at it. Many years of practice, remember?”

He does not look mollified. In fact, he looks even sadder.

“Come back to camp,” he says, in a voice as soft as his touch. “You know Monkey and Pigsy took a beating too. Neither of them would dare to judge you.”

Sandy laughs. The pain bursts in her chest, an explosion that turns the laughter into a sob, that turns the pastel colours to blood-red and obsidian. She tastes rock, dirt, earth, and her eyes roll back in her head. It hurts like dying, but she can’t help herself: it’s so absurd, so utterly ridiculous; what else can she do?

She shuts her eyes, lets the red haze gather in her nose and in her mouth, hot liquor and vegetables frozen under the winter snow, and composes herself.

“I’m not afraid of their judgement.”

She senses his surprise, and then his frown, the scent of fresh linen, a room full of steam. Tripitaka doesn’t like to be confused; this they all know, but it is a heady sensation, to be so close to him when he’s feeling this way.

“What then?” he asks, only slightly frustrated. “What are you afraid of, if not that?”

Sandy wants to explain, to make this easier for him to grasp, but she doesn’t really know if that’s possible. He’ll never be able to understand, not truly, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing: no-one should have to know how it feels to live the life she has. To be seen like this, in pain and in weakness, means that she is easy prey. It means that she can be hunted, taken, _killed_. Perhaps it’s for the best that an innocent young monk not know what that feels like.

“I’m not afraid of anything,” she says.

He sighs. “Sandy...”

“I mean it.” She does. The truth is hot and sticky; it slides down her throat as she swallows, black as tar and thick as molasses. “I’m not afraid of Monkey or Pigsy, or even of you. But this... hiding... it’s the only way to survive. To show pain is to let others know your weak spots, to expose the places they can exploit, the places they can...” She trails off, shuddering. “You have to hide. You _have to_ , Tripitaka, or else they’ll...”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to. He’s still touching her, and she can feel in his fingertips that he hears, he knows, he understands. She wouldn’t wish that understanding on anyone, but here he is, facing it without flinching.

“Not any more,” he whispers, with a conviction that makes her ribs crack against her heart. “Not with us. Not again. Never, _ever_ again.”

His hand grows strangely still, then, as though suspended by some unspoken emotion. Sandy opens her eyes, puzzled, and finds him staring at her chest with an odd, wondering look on his face. Not at her bruised ribs, as she would expect, but a little higher; he’s studying the scrap of fabric wound tightly about her chest, binding her breasts and what little modesty she has left.

It’s not a particularly effective undergarment, as tattered and ragged the rest of her clothing, but it’s nothing particularly remarkable, either. Surely not remarkable enough to catch the eye of a monk, and certainly not remarkable enough to catch the eye of _that_ monk.

No part of her is that remarkable. No part of her is that worthy.

Oblivious to her rising discomfort, Tripitaka flexes his fingers. The movement is like a spasm, like a burst of citrus in her nose and mouth; she wonders if it’s not entirely voluntary. He’s reaching, she realises, fingertips catching gently on the frayed edge of the fabric, and the contact makes Sandy’s vision go blackout-dark. Her breath catches, panic seizing her bruised ribs, but this time, she barely notices the pain at all. She’s too busy watching Tripitaka watch her.

“I, uh...” Her throat is dry, her voice hoarse. She feels exposed in a brand new way, a way she’s never felt before. The close confines of her hiding place seem to press in on her, a strangling sensation not unlike claustrophobia. “You won’t find any bruises there, Tripitaka...”

“I know that.”

There is something new in him now, too; he looks nearly as vulnerable as she feels. Sandy smells brackish water, tangy with salt but calm and much too still, and her tongue floods with the unwanted memory of a home she barely remembers. It counters the spasms in her chest, lets her draw in a couple of breaths without too much pain, lets her recall, if only for a few seconds, what it might feel like to breathe comfortably.

She could stop him, she realises hazily. Could take him by the wrist, move his hand away, reclaim her personal space. This part of her, unremarkable though it is, should never have piqued a monk’s interest in the first place, and she would be perfectly justified in reminding him of this. She’d be justified in doing a great many things, in truth, and her discomfort aches for her to do them, but of course she doesn’t.

She just mumbles, weak and fearful, as useless as she always is when he touches her, “You’re a _monk_.”

Tripitaka doesn’t raise his eyes; perhaps he didn’t even hear her. He seems wholly mesmerised by the fabric, or else by what it’s covering.

“Yes. I just thought, um...” He wets his lips; the tips his fingers slip under the fabric, just ever so slightly. The contact, simple and assessing, lacks any kind of intimacy but it still makes Sandy’s chest constrict, the pain in her ribs intensifying until it’s so blinding she almost misses it when he finally blurts out, “That looks comfortable.”

It’s perhaps the most unexpected, bizarre observation Sandy has ever heard, and she is thoroughly disoriented by it.

“Um.” She blinks, trying to shake out a little of the confusion, but it only makes her dizzier, more befuddled. “What?”

Tripitaka blinks too, as though responding to her disorientation. Then, with the suddenness of a lightning-strike his mind finally seems to catch up to his body and realise what it is doing; he jerks upright like he’s been struck a blow, and stares at his hand as if he’s trying to figure out who it really belongs to.

“Oh!” He’s flushing so hot that Sandy can feel the heat on her own skin, a burn like too much sun, like hot soup scalding her insides. “I’m sorry, um… I didn’t... I mean, I wasn’t... it’s not...” He coughs a few times. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re a monk,” Sandy says again, because it’s about the only truth her mind can process right now. Then, recalling his observation, _that looks comfortable_ , she feels obligated to point out, “You wear robes. I expect your definition of comfort differs from mine.”

Tripitaka’s face falls; apparently she’s missing something significant. He looks almost tearful now, and when he pulls back to touch his own ribs instead, palm pressed flat over the loose, heavy fabric of his clothing, he seems for a moment to be in nearly as much pain as she is. A peculiar reaction indeed, and Sandy has no idea whether she should press him or not.

“Sometimes,” Tripitaka says in a subdued sort of voice, “things look more comfortable than they are.”

It’s wistful, she realises, the odd look on his face. Nostalgic and sort of heartbroken, and though he makes no move to reach for her again his fingers are twitching and flexing like he wants to, like there are some old familiar secrets all tangled up in her clothes, bound tight between her breasts.

“Apparently so,” Sandy says anxiously; she is not used to speaking so brazenly about her own body, much less anyone else’s, and when she gestures down at her poorly-bound chest it is with panic pooling in her belly. “But there is nothing comfortable in this, either. It’s tight, it’s restrictive, and it makes breathing very difficult when you’re...” She swallows. “...uneasy.”

“Yeah,” Tripitaka sighs, then hastily clears his throat. “I mean, uh, I can imagine.”

Sandy accommodatingly turns away from his splutters. “It’s not very comfortable at all,” she assures him. “You should be glad it’s not something you’ll ever have to endure for yourself.”

This must have been the wrong thing to say, somehow, because when she looks back at him he’s reeling like she’s just punched him in the face. Sandy will never really understand why honesty is such a troubling thing to humans, but it’s far from the first time she’s tried that approach and ended up doing more harm than good.

“I...” His voice quakes, turning the air thin and yellow-green. He’s still touching his own ribs, still looking wistful and pensive, and Sandy feels lost and confused. “Right. Okay.”

“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t know why, but she knows the colours of his sadness intimately now, and she would give anything to soften them. “I didn’t mean to... whatever it is I did.”

“You didn’t do anything.” Lie. It cuts through the air, a sprinkling of rust to season the yellow, the green, even his familiar melancholy greys. “But you should loosen it a little if it hurts to breathe. I know... I mean, that is, I’ve _heard_... it can make things even more painful if you’re bound too tightly.”

True enough. Sandy wonders only briefly where he would have come by such information, struck by the unpleasant certainty that she doesn’t want to know. Monks look after all sorts of lost, wretched souls; it’s not unlikely he’s tended many of bodies like hers, broken and bent and bowed, held together with scraps and tatters. She wonders if that’s what he sees when he stares at her chest: all those others, and all their myriad sufferings.

The thought makes her ache somewhere much deeper than her ribs. Tripitaka is such a sweet boy, and so empathic; Sandy can’t bear to think about the things he must have witnessed, can’t bear to wonder how much he had to take into himself, too generous of spirit not to share others’ pain.

She doesn’t know what to say. Her cramped little hiding space feels even smaller now, like the walls are closing in, like there’s not enough air for the two of them to breathe. Her heart is hammering, her pulse a leaping staccato rhythm, and the pain splitting her ribs grows worse and worse as she fights to keep from losing herself to the panic completely.

“Perhaps you’re right,” she manages faintly. “I should... um...”

“You should definitely loosen it,” Tripitaka presses, looking worried. “You’re, uh... I think you’re hyperventilating.”

“Yes. Um. Probably.” It’s a truth she can’t hide; he’s still staring at her chest, he must notice the way it’s heaving. But she doesn’t want him to know that he’s a big part of the reason why, so she clenches her teeth and scrambles for a less uncomfortable explanation. “It’s... uh, it happens sometimes. When it hurts, you know? Because it... um, pain, yes? It has that effect. And it’s hard to... it’s... that is, uh...”

Speaking makes it worse, so she stops, shaking her head and feeling stupid.

Tripitaka doesn’t seem to mind her babbling gibberish, though. He nods thoughtfully, like he somehow managed to glean a cohesive sentence out of all that nonsense, and lets his hand fall away from his own chest. He’s all softness and light now that his attention is back on her, and when he reaches for her again it’s with tenderness, and compassion that sticks to her tongue like liquorice, like summer and winter at the same time, flowers and snow, earth and ice.

“Here,” he breathes. “Let me...”

The contact, when he finally makes it, hits her like a punch. Sandy jerks back so sharply that her head slams into the wall. She sees stars for a moment, pulsing visions of colour and sensation that throb in sync with her ribs, intensifying until there is nothing left, every part of her battered and bruised and beaten, twinkling stars against a sea of black, a sea of _pain_ —

Then her vision clears, and she finds Tripitaka gawking at her like he has no idea what just happened.

“Uh. Are you okay?”

“You...” Sandy works her jaw a bit, tries to loosen it enough that speaking isn’t a chore. “You’re a...”

But how many times in one conversation must she remind him of what he is? How many times in the days and weeks they’ve been travelling together has she needed to point out that he is a monk? Surely he _knows_.

He’s still staring at her, though, like he really doesn’t, like he honestly can’t piece together her words in the context of what he was doing. It makes her feel like she’s going mad, like she’s seeing something that isn’t there.

“Sandy,” he says, looking confused and a little embarrassed.

“I...” She shakes her head, tries again. “Aren’t there, um, rules about this sort of thing?”

“What sort of thing?” 

He’s being sincere, she can tell, and his earnest confusion shakes the truth out of her again, a shuddering breath that screams in her chest and makes the pain worse. “Touching people. Like that. Um. You know? A monk putting his hands on... um...”

She gestures, again, at her chest, lost for the words to describe herself.

Tripitaka blinks for another beat or two, then, as he finally gets it, he blanches so pale she thinks he’s going to faint.

“Oh!” He coughs, flounders like a fish drowning on dry land, then hastily recovers himself. “Well, uh... I mean, of course there are rules about... about that. But it’s different for, uh, healing. Which is what I was doing. Healing. Which is different. Totally different. Right?”

He doesn’t sound particularly sure of himself. Sandy squirms.

“I don’t want to be the cause of any impropriety,” she mumbles. “And I’m sure I can loosen it myself.”

The stricken look on Tripitaka’s face is unexpected and sharp, the tang of hot chilli flooding her tongue.

“Right. Sure. Of course.” He inches back, as best he can in such a tight space, and his expression seems to grow distant along with the rest of him, pastel watercolours bleeding and blending, the sharpness dissolving to something softer but not sweeter, a sort of lonely sadness like the sky after a heavy rain. “Do you want me to leave?”

Sandy has no idea what she wants. She is not generally shy about her body — it’s her face that usually causes trouble — but she had assumed that Tripitaka would be. He has flushed and floundered and faltered more times than she can count, refused to let anyone come close when he bathes or washes his clothes, keeping a distance when they do the same, lest he be invited to join them. She doesn’t understand why he’s not responding in the same manner now, why his usual need for privacy is absent here, in this too-tight space with his eyes fixed on her chest.

“I don’t know,” she admits, after a long, helpless beat. “I assumed _you’d_ want to leave. I know that it means a lot to you, keeping your distance from others’ bodies.”

“Not like this,” he says, sounding a little breathless. “This is different. You’re injured. And you’re not... I mean... it’s not _you_ , it’s...”

His stuttering speaks volumes. Sandy tries to smile, to offer reassurance, but the rain-scented loneliness hasn’t left his face and it’s hard not to share his sorrow when he wears it so openly and so visibly, its colours painting the air, its delicate fragrances and strong flavours filling her senses.

“I see,” she says, navigating these murky waters with great care. “So it’s only your body, then?”

He flushes slightly at that, but his expression doesn’t change. “Uh...”

“It’s all right, Tripitaka.” It’s still a challenge, trying to smile, but it seems important somehow, and so she does the best she can, for him. “It’s just that boundaries are so confusing. And you are so particular about yours.”

“I don’t mean to be.” He exhales, a shaky little sigh that glimmers like sunshine. “It’s complicated. I wish it wasn’t, I really do.” His eyes fall to her chest again, but this time Sandy holds her body still and refuses to flinch. He looks so sad, so wistful and alone; she won’t pull away from him now, no matter her uneasiness. “I want to be able to... I miss being able to touch. I want things to be simple again. Things like this... you, hurting and me, able to help. It should be simple, but it’s not. And I hate that.”

Sandy furrows her brow, struggling to keep up. “Because you’re a monk?”

“Because...” A thousand new emotions seem to flare behind his eyes, more new colours that Sandy can catch on her tongue. “Because I’m _supposed_ to be a monk.”

He claps a hand over his mouth as he says it, looking trapped and horrified, like he’s let slip some dreadful, terrible secret. Sandy wants to soothe him, to comfort him somehow, but she has no idea where to begin.

“You’re still young,” she reminds him. “You have plenty of time to grow into your robes. And your faith.”

She’s not sure if it helps, but a little of the sickly horror bleeds out of him, the unpleasant flavours dissolving until she sees him again as himself, the pale blue of his smile, the sweet warmth behind his eyes; she tastes sugar, fruit, home, she smells the sea, and all is as it should be.

“I want to help you,” he says, speaking slowly and carefully. “You’re in pain, and I know... that is to say, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to... um, how to ease breathing.” He flushes, bowing his head, one hand pressed to his own chest, his eyes still fixed on hers. “If it’s too tight, I can... I mean, I want to, I...”

He sounds so upset, so helpless. Not frustration at his ineptitude, his youth and inexperience as a holy monk; this runs much deeper. Sandy can taste the washed-out greys of loneliness, of isolation, of being separate and apart from something that he wants so desperately to connect with.

She does not understand how that something could be _her_.

“You want to help,” she says. “To be able to offer healing?”

“I want to be able to touch you,” he whispers, sounding ragged and lost. “I hate that I have to keep my distance. Especially in times like this, when you’re in pain and I know I can help. I hate that I have to be a monk, that I have to be a—” He breaks off sharply, shaking his head. “I just want to be the person I was.”

Sandy frowns. “Before you took your vows?”

“ _Before_ ,” he says simply, and leaves it there.

Sandy doesn’t ask. It’s not her place to press him for his private feelings or experiences, no more than it’s her place to pry into what it means to be a monk in the first place. Faith is a human thing, precious and deeply personal, or so the Scholar told her. She doesn’t want to intrude on that, doesn’t want to make herself a part of something that was never intended for her to share.

But he looks so lonely, so sad and small, and his eyes are trembling with tears, filling her head with the smell of burning wood, of dead grass, of loss and grief, and all she knows — all she understands — is that she wants to make it better.

Sandy closes her eyes, lets her vision flood with endless, colourless black; it centres her and scares her at the same time. She breathes slowly; it hurts, but she ignores it, trying to focus on her other senses instead, the taste, the smell, the prickling under her skin, his emotions barrelling into her like little shockwaves. She feels her way through them one by one: helplessness, loneliness, grief, pain. Some other things, too, but Sandy’s experience with human emotion is limited and she doesn’t know their names.

She holds them on her tongue, tastes them, takes them, swallows them down. Then, willing her voice and her body not to shake too hard, she says, “You know, perhaps I do need some help.”

Tripitaka is staring blankly at her again when she opens her eyes. His colours are muted now, easier to digest. 

“Huh?” he squeaks, with all the hopeful confusion of a child, and this time it is no challenge at all, to look him in the eye and find a smile.

“It’s difficult to move,” she explains, “when one is in such pain.”

A lie, of course. True for many, perhaps, but not for her. Pain is her heartbeat, it’s been a part of her for so long she’s forgotten what it’s like to not feel it. She has never needed any kind of help when she’s been injured before, and she certainly has no need for it now; she could have simply remained here for a time, eyes shut, breathing in salt, and returned to their camp feeling braver and stronger for having been alone.

But Tripitaka doesn’t need to know that. He only needs to know that Sandy will always be receptive to anything he offers. Whatever help, whatever ‘healing’ he feels he can give, she will never, ever turn him away.

She takes his hands in hers, hasty and frantic, before she has a chance to change her mind. Her heart is hammering, little staccato strikes that slam against her ribs, that pull and tug against the fabric binding her, that make her _hurt_. It is vividly unpleasant, and there is a feeling of genuine relief when she draws Tripitaka’s hands up to cover her chest, watching as his eyes go wide.

“Uh.” His fingertips flutter, shy and self-conscious. “Are you sure?”

Sandy doesn’t flinch. Not this time.

“If you’re willing.” She wonders if he can feel the catch in her breath as she says it, the lingering panic she can’t quite quash. “Perhaps, if it’s not so improprietous, you could forgo your vows, just once, in the name of...” She pauses, letting the word sit on her tongue, tangy and exotic. “...‘healing’?”

The moment she takes to brace herself is not enough to hold back the flood of emotion that surges in her once the words are out. Dread, panic, sickness; the relief is smothered almost before she’s recognised the taste. It is a terror of a thing, asking to be touched, laying bare her bruised, battered body, exposing herself to someone else’s hands with nothing but the faith he won’t harm her.

Sandy has never had much faith in people to not do her harm; they’ve never given her any reason to. But _Tripitaka_...

He is different. He has always been different, and that difference throws light like rainbows through the cracks of her fear and nausea, and it helps more than she could have imagined to look up and ground herself in the water behind his eyes, to breathe through the panic and remember that it is _him_ , that he has always been the exception to her fears and her nightmares, that she would trust him with her wounds and with her life, that she does not care — never cared, even before they met — how much like a true monk he is is or isn’t, only that he is here, and that somehow he sees her as someone worth touching.

That he wants to. That he would set aside his vows, his order, just to put his hands on her. That he would—

“Okay.” His voice is a tremor, like the weight of snow on a fragile branch in the moment before it falls; Sandy tastes winter, tastes ice, tastes the frozen bite of pain. “Okay, hold still. Okay? Breathe slowly, and I’ll just...”

Heart pounding, ribs threatening to shatter, Sandy obeys, swallowing and swallowing as his fingertips move over her skin, featherlight and reverent, as he loosens the fabric with a patient, practised hand. She expects his hands to tremble like his voice, like her body but they don’t. He acts like he’s done this many times before.

“Thank you.” She’s hoarse, still shaking, but her breathing comes a little easier as he rearranges the frayed, torn material, giving her ribs the space they need to expand, to scream just a little quieter. “Oh, thank you.”

Tripitaka smiles. His face, beatific and warm, appears to Sandy like the reflection of sunlight in water. Light and hot, but just far enough away not to burn her. His hands, still covering her chest, are so gentle and so careful, like he really does know, somehow, from experience, just how painful this sort of pressure can be, how restrictive and tight and—

“Thank _you_ ,” he says, pulling away with such reluctance that Sandy is left reeling. “I don’t think you’ll ever understand how much it means...”

Sandy blinks down at her chest, overwhelmed again and very confused. “I assure you, it’s nothing special.”

“Not that.” He swats her arm, almost playful. “Just... being able to. Being normal for once. Being allowed to touch another...” He coughs. “That is, to touch another _person_ , like it’s all right. Like it’s not some great terrible taboo.”

“There is nothing terrible in you, Tripitaka. And I would never turn away your touch unless you wanted me to.” The words fall out of her, unexpected; they surprise her rather more than they do him — she has never felt comfortable at the thought of being touched by anyone, much less someone she worships so completely — but she will not take it back now. “Taboo or otherwise. Yours is the first touch I’ve ever known that didn’t fri— that didn’t make me _uneasy_.”

It is not a whole truth, but it’s not altogether a lie either. It’s a strange sort of in-between feeling, where she is absolutely terrified and yet somehow closer to peace than she’s ever known.

She doesn’t understand it, and she doesn’t expect Tripitaka to, either, but something in his smile says that he does. The warmth is growing in him now, and it touches her too, fresh bread pulled out of the oven, melting butter over the top, soft and hot and nourishing; it fills her, and so does the nameless something gleaming in his eyes. _Home_ , or a place that will be.

“I feel more like myself,” he says, “when I touch you.”

Sandy doesn’t really understand that, but she knows by now that she doesn’t need to; it is not her place to make sense of his personal feelings or struggles, just as it is not his place to wonder why she’s still so frightened of the sky. It is enough that he has seen her shaking, that he never questions it, that he lets her hide when she feels overwhelmed and does not judge her or treat her differently from the others. If she can offer some small piece of the same in return, it doesn’t matter whether she understands it or not.

“I’d rather not need your touch, if I can help it,” she says, wincing as her ribs remind her why he was touching her in the first place. “At least, not like this. But my... I mean to say, all of me. Whatever parts of me you’d care to touch.” The words take a new shape on the air, hot pink and sensual, and she flushes hotly. “That’s not what I mean. I didn’t... um... I meant to say...”

Tripitaka laughs, high and lovely, like the freewheeling dance of a soaring bird. “I know what you meant.”

“Good.” She takes a deep, painful breath. “I’m yours, Tripitaka. However you need me.”

She hopes that he knows that already. She thinks he does; she’s never been shy about showing her devotion. But still, with the ghosts of his fingerprints still on her chest, sticky and sweet-tasting, it seems important to say it again. Like it means more, maybe, or perhaps like it means something a little bit new.

He seems to appreciate it, at least. He is glowing now, honey-sweet and summer-warm, and Sandy has never before found comfort in either of those things but she finds it here now, watching him shine and knowing that she made it happen, that he is shining because of her.

“How’s your breathing?” he asks, low with affection.

Sandy touches her ribs, testing. The pain is still there, pulsing thickly under her palm, suffering as familiar as the taste of his smile, but it is duller now, tempered far more by his touch than by the loosening of her clothes. Her skin, for once, feels like it might actually fit her, and the throb of the bruises sounds more like a lullaby now than the thundering drumbeat it was before.

She looks up at Tripitaka, both of them feeling the new comfort of being touched, and says, “Perfect.”

**


	5. Fly From Heaven

**

The monastery is old and small and sad.

Cracked stone, ancient, water inside gone stagnant. Tastes of night, of ink-black and shadow-purple, stale and mildewed. Cold to look at, colder to the touch. Cold on the inside too, most likely, but it’s late and the world is blurred with rain that won’t stop, and with only empty barren space for a hundred leagues in every direction, there is nowhere else to seek out shelter.

It’s safe, at least. Smells of sanctuary, of truth and wisdom, old books and older wood, dust gathering on them both. The scrape of a quill on parchment, ink pooling in the well. Safe, yes, definitely, and when Tripitaka turns to look at her, the question hanging like a burden on the air between them, Sandy nods and summons a shaky, rain-soaked smile.

Apparently that’s all he needs.

 _Safe_ , she thinks, and he hears.

How strange, she muses, that he has come to trust her judgement so well that all it takes to reassure him is a glance and the faintest twitch of her lips.

On another day, that might terrify her. His faith, his affection, the way he smiles back like he can see the sun again through her eyes, all of it so new, so intimidating, and she is still so unworthy. On another day, she would panic, flee into the night, hide under the sheets of rain and let the water carry her away from this place.

Today, already soaked to the skin, surrounded by the smell of shadows and the dust-covered taste of cold stone and a warm hearth, she knows that her place is at his side.

“Well?” Monkey grumbles, oblivious to the moment between them. He is irritable, as he always is when it rains, water trickling down from his hair into his eyes, and if she didn’t know that it would anger him more, Sandy might laugh to see him so bedraggled. “Are we going inside or not?”

Tripitaka smiles at him, rose-pink and cherry-sweet, the colour of a perfect blush. “Yeah, let’s go inside.”

So they do.

Monkey and Pigsy seem indifferent, either oblivious or simply not caring that they’re stepping onto hallowed ground. Tripitaka is acutely aware; Sandy can smell the lightning-on-water sharpness of his nerves, alight and hyperactive. It’s the first time he’s been among his own kind since the quest began, he must be feeling a great deal of emotion.

Sandy is nervous too, but not in such a pleasant way. Her stomach is churning with a queasy kind of unease, familiar and unwanted, like she’s swallowed a heavy stone. She’s not met many monks in her time — only the Scholar, really, and now Tripitaka — but she knows that they’re meant to be kind people, men and women dedicated to preserving what’s true, to protecting others, to being _good_.

Tripitaka is one of their own, she reminds herself sharply. They will treat with kindness anybody who walks in his company. Even someone who has no right to be here. Even a demon-faced monster who has hunted and hurt and—

She’s not sure she wants to be treated with kindness. She knows she doesn’t deserve it.

Inside, it is quieter but no less cold. _Safe_ , Sandy reminds herself, and breathes slowly.

The rain is muffled in here, tapping on the windows every now and then but otherwise swallowed up by the stone. Sandy feels like she’s been swallowed too, chewed up and churned, torn away from the rain, the sweet-tasting water, the storm that soothes her nerves and makes her insides grow still. She doesn’t complain, but she feels it right down to her bones, the familiar separation from the part of her that sings.

This is not the first time she’s been dragged by her friends into some makeshift shelter or another because it started to rain, but she knows better by now than to try and resist when it happens.

“You’ll catch a cold,” Tripitaka chided, the first time they got caught in a downpour like this, the first time Sandy tried to stay outside while the others ran for cover.

“I’m a god,” she reminded him. “Gods don’t catch cold.”

Pigsy, ever the contrarian, sneezed and said, “We really, really do.”

And that was the end of that.

Now, it is automatic: the rain starts, they search for shelter, and Sandy is not allowed to stay outside. It’s been a slow and difficult lesson, silencing the urges of her body, fighting the need to throw herself out into the flood, but she does it for Tripitaka because he looks at her with such protective tenderness, like he really believes she could suffer from overexposure to the water that flows in her veins like blood. Like a rainstorm is somehow a bigger threat than a desert.

She hid her misery very well in the desert; perhaps he simply didn’t notice how bad it really was. No wonder, then, if he doesn’t understand how much worse it is to survive with too little water than too much.

And so here she is. Inside a sad, small building — a monastery, home to the holiest of humans, the best and brightest the world has to offer — chewed up and swallowed by old, cold stone; she can barely breathe in here, but at least she is with him.

The monks greet them politely, with subdued smiles and only the most cursory of examinations. Well accustomed to strange and unexpected visitors, no doubt — there is no other shelter within a hundred leagues, or so it seems — and comfortable enough in their surroundings to not feel threatened. They don’t seem to recognise Monkey or his crown, and if they realise that three of their new guests are gods they seem not to care; when they speak, they speak to Tripitaka alone.

“You are welcome within these walls,” the oldest one says. Sandy waits for the inevitable ‘except that one’, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he adds, more generally, “But you must understand that this is a place of holiness and worship. Your friends’ weapons...”

Sandy bites down on a whimper; her body doesn’t know whether to relax or tense. Her fingers clench of their own accord, gripping her scythe more tightly, more protectively.

Tripitaka, meanwhile, is looking rather pointedly at Monkey. “Of course,” he says, in a firm, authoritative voice.

Monkey, who had the foresight to shrink his staff before entry, who wears it now in his hair like an accessory, spreads his arms wide, flashes his most charming and arrogant smirk, and says, “Do I look armed to you?”

Pigsy, being rather less talented at shrinking things, glowers. “Unfair.”

Still, he hands over his rake without a fuss, nodding to the monk with a strange, unexpected sort of familiarity. It’s jarring enough that Sandy almost wonders, for a moment, no longer, if this isn’t the first time he’s sought refuge in a place like this.

She doesn’t have time to dwell on it, though. One of the younger monks is stepping forward, reaching for her scythe, and every atom in her body seizes up with instinctive resistance.

He’s a harmless little thing, the monk who approaches, small and unthreatening, and the gesture is clearly intended to assist rather than insist. He means no disrespect or insult, and he certainly isn’t threatening her, and yet Sandy’s reflexes sharpen inside of her before he can draw close. She lurches backwards, clutching the weapon tighter, a low growl gurgling in her throat before she can smother it.

Tripitaka looks horrified, humiliated. “Sandy!”

“I...” She swallows, chokes on the animal violence; it tastes like raw meat, rancid and deadly, but it is a part of her and she cannot swallow it down. “Sorry.”

“It’s a monastery,” Pigsy reminds her. “You think they’re going to turn around and smack you with it?”

Sandy feels trapped, more and more the more people are staring at her. Don’t they know it’s not helping? Don’t they know it’s dangerous to lock eyes with a trapped animal? 

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” she manages, because there is no other way to express the chaos inside her.

“You’ve put your weapon down before,” Tripitaka points out. His usual boundless patience is fraying now, most likely a product of their location; she can taste the conflict in his expression, the melted sugar turning to salt in this place that reminds him of his one-time home. “Besides, this is a hallowed place. It’s safe here.”

“I know that,” Sandy mumbles, feeling foolish.

She doesn’t try to explain. She doesn’t know if she could, even if she did. Most of the time she doesn’t even understand herself; how can she expect Tripitaka, or even her fellow gods, to understand what she knows makes no sense, what changes from one moment to the next?

Her instincts are a tangle of razor-wire, made to bleed and cut and tear. They taste like rust, smell of molten metal, and she can’t touch them without being burned or seared or cut to ribbons. She has lived her life in a world that wants her dead; the very thought of being unarmed among strangers — even monks, even in this most hallowed of places — leaves her paralysed.

No doubt the Scholar would be able to explain it. He spoke sometimes about her life, the marks it left inside her, the strangeness in her mind, the strangeness in the way she sees and tastes and senses the world around her. _You weren’t made to live like this,_ he explained once, but he never taught her how to live any other way. He never taught her how to survive in the light or under the endless sky, in the great big world. He only taught her what was wrong with her, never how she could make it right.

Tripitaka sighs. He is sodden and exhausted and whatever patience he might have had has long since evaporated now. No doubt he’s looking forward to spending some time with others of his kind, to being able to bathe and change his robes for once in peace and quiet. This is the first time that they’ve met with other monks since they set out on the quest; he probably wants to do monkish things with them. And here is Sandy, being difficult for no reason at all.

“Sandy,” he says again, and the edge to his voice is like the razor-wire in her head, tasting of flesh and blood and pain, crimson red and rusted iron. “Please.”

The word carves her up. He so rarely pleads with her; she so rarely gives him any reason to. If he is pleading now, he must really be at the end of his patience.

She looks at the monks for a beat. Then she looks back at Tripitaka, staring up at her with his wide, dark eyes, the scent of chocolate and the taste of strong black tea. She wants so badly to be what he wants her to be, to yield and obey, but her fingers are locked tight around her scythe and no matter how hard she tries they will not loosen.

“I don’t mean to...” She closes her eyes, exhales slowly, composes herself as best she can while the walls are closing in around her. “This place is a haven. A sanctuary. Someone should... _I_ should go outside and stand guard. To ensure it stays that way.”

That last is rather more of a whimper than a word. She prays that no-one notices.

“I assure you,” the oldest of the monks says, “that such a thing is unnecessary. This place may look weather-beaten and worn, but we’re quite capable of protecting ourselves.”

Sandy doesn’t doubt that; it speaks volumes that the place is still standing at all. But now that it’s been said...

“We have enemies,” she mumbles, staring at the ground. “I’m sure Tripitaka... I mean, we, all of us... we’d feel awful if you were forced to face trouble on our behalf.” She turns back to the door, listens to the drumming of rain on the battered stone, imagines being held by so much water, so much life. “Please. I want to.”

The monks glance at Tripitaka, who shrugs. “If you’d feel more comfortable out there,” he says slowly.

She would, very much. She’s not sure why that’s true — perhaps it’s just the rain, calling her as it so often does — but so it is. Still, the look on his face says that’s not really what he wants to hear, or what he wants her to do, and so she twists that truth into a gentler one, hopefully one a little easier for him to swallow down.

“I think it’s the proper thing to do,” she says carefully. “Respectful, yes? We’re their guests. We should be mindful of what we bring to their door.”

Monkey snickers. “She just wants to go out and play in the rain.”

There’s no point in denying that, so she doesn’t. “I can do both.”

Tripitaka massages his temples. Sandy can taste his weariness, thick and tough, like the kind of bread it takes days to chew through; she doesn’t want to be the cause of that, or the heavy grey clouds where his pale blue joy should be, and so she inches back towards the door, putting a little distance between them, making sure he knows that she is trying to make this easier, not harder.

“Whatever you want,” he sighs, after a long moment. “But _please_ try not to catch a cold.”

Sandy lets out the breath she hadn’t realised she was holding.

“I won’t,” she promises, not for the first time. “I’m very resistant.”

Behind her back, Pigsy guffaws. “Very _something_ , all right.”

Sandy, being simultaneously unable and unwilling to argue, lets that slide.

*

The monastery’s roof is high and slanted, and it offers rather more shelter than Sandy would like.

Beyond it, the rain pours down in sheets, glimmering rainbows of water that stop her breath and make her yearn to leap out into it, to drink and swim and drown until it envelops her completely, fresh-tasting and cold.

She refrains, only because she knows that Tripitaka will chide her if she returns to him soaked to the bone.

It’s just one of the many differences between them, she supposes. He is human, naturally limited; he’ll never understand what it means to breathe water, to _be_ water, no more than she will ever understand what it means to be a monk, to belong in a place like this, to find a home under a high slanted roof, to feel safe surrounded by walls, to look up at the people around her and see a _family_ —

The kick in her chest is unexpected, but far from unfamiliar.

She grips her scythe a little tighter, scours the hazy horizon.

It’s empty, of course, no signs of life as far as the eye can see. But then, what did she expect? Not even the stupidest of demons would be out in this weather by choice; no-one would, unless they already had water coursing through their veins.

Hers are singing. Alone, alive, and away from the walls and the stone, the holiest of havens, the place of reverence and worship, the sanctuary for the good and kind.

Them, not her. She is not good, she is not kind, and she will not taint their sanctuary with her presence. She doesn’t belong in there; she belongs out here, standing guard against enemies that never existed, soaked to the skin.

Wishing she was soaked, anyway. Wishing it was permitted.

She would give anything to simply step out into the downpour and drown, not caring what the others would think or say, not caring about anything but the water pouring down onto her head, making things clearer, putting her thoughts back into order, making it all make sense.

The world is so much clearer when she’s soaked, when everything around her is shimmering, smelling of salt and sea and solitude, when her empty belly remembers fried fish and boiled vegetables, when her lungs don’t have to work so hard to breathe. The rain tastes of memory, flickering moments of firelight and family, walls made not from stone but just as solid. A home, a hearth, a—

“Hey.”

The voice comes out of nowhere. She must have been terribly lost, not to hear the footsteps or the breathing that preceded it. It startles her, so unexpected that she almost jumps out of her skin, crying out her surprise even as she realises — too late to keep from embarrassing herself — that she should have anticipated it: as usual, she’s not allowed to be alone for too long.

“Tripitaka.” A bit flatter than she usually says it, a little less welcoming. Still, he seems unoffended. “I’m staying out of the rain. Only standing guard, just as I said I would. You needn’t worry.”

“I wasn’t,” he says, frowning as he closes the heavy monastery door behind him. “I’m not out here to check up on you, Sandy, I promise.”

“Oh.” She touches her chest, breathes steadily until her heartbeat is nearly normal again. “Are you all right?”

“I...” The hesitation is very telling; Sandy wonders if he knows how many different colours he shines when he’s feeling things strongly, how many different shades of blue a person can get. “Of course. I just wanted some fresh air.”

“Ah.” She turns away from him, needing the space for herself as much as for his sake, and gazes back out at the sheeting rain. “As you can see, the air is very fresh. Wonderfully fresh. I feel...”

She stops. Doesn’t want him to know how much the rain makes her blood sing, doesn’t want him to feel bad for holding her back from the place she wants — needs — _wants_ to be.

Tripitaka’s fingers flex at his sides, like he wants to touch her but doesn’t know if the contact would be welcome. Sandy, feeling pinned by his presence, isn’t entirely sure either.

“I’m glad you’re happy,” he says, with gentle, pastel-shaded warmth.

Sandy isn’t sure if _happy_ is the right word, but at least she feels like she can breathe out here. It’s late and it’s very dark, and the endless, terrifying sky is blotted out by clouds, by the sweep of rain, by the drumbeat of hard water as it falls and falls and falls; if she closes her eyes tightly enough, she can almost pretend she’s back in the sewers of Palawa, hidden away and safely out of sight. Solitary, safe. No need to pretend she’s more than she is, no need to pretend she is worthy of being in a place like this.

“It’s more comfortable out here,” she says, after a deliberative beat. “Fresh air, yes? As you said.”

Tripitaka’s expression speaks volumes; no doubt he’s thinking of the incident that drove her out here in the first place, the way she refused to relinquish her weapon even in a place of peace.

“Just the fresh air?” he presses, as clumsily tactless as he always is when he believes he’s being dexterous and tactful.

Sandy sighs. “A monastery is a holy place,” she says. “That’s what he said. A place for people like you, reverent and worshipful and good. A place for people like Monkey, who have many reasons to be revered and worshipped. And Pigsy...” She closes her eyes, pictures his casual, easy grin; she’s not sure if it makes her feel better or worse. “He doesn’t care enough to question it. He seeks shelter, they’re willing to provide it. Nothing else matters to him.”

Tripitaka’s breath catches just a little. “And you?”

Sandy doesn’t need to open her eyes to see his face. Even with them shut tight, she can feel him glowing, shimmering, the pale blues of his smile, the sugar dusting his voice, all the kindness and compassion that make her feel so wonderful and so frightened.

Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult to speak about this with him. He, who embodies so much of what this monastery represents. He, who is one of them, who is the very best of them. He, who is—

“I don’t feel it’s my place to be there,” she mumbles, clenching her teeth until her jaw starts to ache. “I belong here, in the rain and the cold. Here, where I can breathe the water and see the horizon and know when trouble comes.”

When she finally summons the courage to open her eyes, she finds Tripitaka smiling. Soft and ever so slightly sad, it’s the fond sugar-mixed-with-salt smile he usually reserves for Monkey when the arrogant super-god does something unexpectedly selfless.

“That’s a poetic way of saying ‘stand guard’,” he remarks.

Sandy’s face burns hot; her throat is clogged with embers. “No. I don’t... that’s not what I...” She exhales, tries again. “I’m uncomfortable in there. And I’m... that is, I’m less uncomfortable out here. Simple, yes?”

Tripitaka chuckles. “I’m don’t know if ‘simple’ is a word I’d ever apply to you,” he quips. “But I was only teasing. You know I understand it when you get... uneasy.”

Sandy growls, instinctive, and squeezes the haft of her scythe. “I am _not_.”

“Okay.” The sweet-bitter smile falls off his face, revealing a deeper sorrow beneath, something that tastes a little more charred, smells a little acrid. “To be honest, I didn’t feel comfortable in there either.”

That’s unexpected. So much so that Sandy can do nothing for a few moments but frown stupidly at him.

She expected him to be delighted to be here here, to feel at home for the first time since the quest began. He has been so anxious, so uncomfortable in his own skin, always on edge and aware of the difference between himself and his god companions. It has been a burden, she knows, to be so far away from his fellow monks, she’d assumed it would be like a breath of life to finally be back among his own people.

Not so, apparently. Looking at him more closely, she finds his face pinched and wan, a bitter-tasting mix of spices and things that should not be spiced, tension and sorrow and some strange sour-smelling something that she doesn’t recognise. He _is_ uncomfortable here, perhaps more uncomfortable than she has ever seen him before. Which, given the fact that he once threw rocks at her for catching him half-dressed, is really saying something.

She doesn’t understand where the reaction is coming from, what could possibly cause him to feel this way, but it is a welcome distraction from her own uneasiness, to think about his instead. To study the places where his colours grow blurry and distorted, the cloying smell of anxiety, the gloom gathering behind his eyes, purple-shaded and heavy, like poison in the rain.

Sandy has tasted many poisons in her time, both real and illusory. This is the first that doesn’t make her sick, that makes her yearn to reach out instead and embrace it.

“Why?” she squeaks, and the word tastes nothing like what she means to say, what she wants to say.

Tripitaka isn’t looking at her any more. Self-conscious, perhaps, or else simply ashamed, he’s looking upwards instead, at the slanted roof of the monastery, the small rivers of rain spilling over its edge, the shadows underneath where they stand sheltered, the small safe spot in the doorway where the water doesn’t reach.

“I’m not what they think.” He’s speaking to the rain, to the roof, not to her. Sandy knows from experience that it’s sometimes easier that way. “I couldn’t deceive them.”

Taking her cues from him, Sandy turns away too, facing the far horizon. It’s very dark, but if she squints she can trace the path of the storm, thousands of raindrops separating in the air and coming back together on the ground, the kind of river that flows and flows and doesn’t need to seek the sea.

“You doubt yourself so much,” she murmurs, also to the rain.

Beside her, the briefest flutter of motion. Sandy doesn’t turn around, but she can feel the shift in the air, the heaviness of indecision, of vulnerability, the shy shadow-coloured shimmer of Tripitaka’s deeper emotions; her tongue is thick with the mixed grains of a monastery breakfast, her airways tight with the smell of burning wax, all the little things she thought would make him comfortable, all the not-so-little reasons he’s standing out here with her instead.

He touches her hand and the water turns to fire, a burst of flavour like snow falling on a burning pyre.

“I’m not like them,” he whispers, pressing the words into her palm like the most precious secret, or perhaps the most dangerous. “They’re real monks. I... I’m not.”

Sandy’s heart catches fire too, a bit. She aches so much for this little human. She aches so, so much.

“You’re not less,” she tells him, “just because you’re small.”

He doesn’t move, but she feels the tremors under his skin as if they were her own. His fingertips quake like butterflies against her palm, fragile and weather-beaten; he is frightened, terrified, but he has no reason to be. He may be small, may be young and inexperienced, but he is the most powerful human Sandy has ever met; those trembling fingers could crush her heart between them if they chose.

He deserves so much more than the self-doubt that cripples him. She’s seen it before, more times than she can count, the moments of paralysis and self-doubt, the strange nameless sorrow that ripples behind his eyes, grief for the Scholar and something much more complex, chocolate-rich and coffee-sharp, the red-black shame that casts its dark shadow across his face, drowning the beautiful blue.

Sandy knows self-loathing better than anyone. She has never seen her own reflection without seeing a monster or a demon staring back, the face of a nightmare, the awful names that were hurled at her head, wounding her before she even understood what they meant. The world has hated her for as long as she remembers; why wouldn’t she follow suit?

But Tripitaka is nothing like her. He is beautiful and powerful and strong. He is radiance and holiness, faith made flesh, and he does not deserve to feel small just because his body says he is.

He squeezes her hand, then, and she is struck by the warmth in his; perhaps she is simply colder than she realised, but it feels like he is pushing some of his own heat, some of his own life, into her waterlogged veins.

“It’s kind of you to say,” he sighs. “But it’s not that.”

“Then what?” Her voice, like the press of his fingertips against her palm, trembles and threatens to break. “I’m sure those monks are honoured to have you in their company.”

He turns a little pale at that, like maybe that’s part of the problem: the weight of their expectations, their hopes for the great monk who bears the holy name. Sandy understands that, though she wishes she didn’t. She may know that his fears carry no truth, but he does not; now, as always, he sees himself as undeserving.

“Sandy.” His voice turns dark, like sand and earth when the rain burrows deep. “Please, don’t.”

But she can’t simply _not_. She knows this voice, she hears it in her own head every time she tries to envision herself as something more than what she is. Ochre and dirt, the burnt-out yellows of a field gone fallow, the deadly taste of decay and disease. It is a terrible burden, that sour-coloured voice and she will not allow Tripitaka to bear it as well.

“You _are_ worthy,” she rasps, hoarse with the truth of it, the weight and the hurt of knowing it won’t help. “You are the best of us, Tripitaka. You deserve all their hospitality, all their warmth, their kindness. You deserve to spend time among your brethren. If only for a short little while, you deserve to feel at _home_.”

It is only after the words are all out, only when his face floods with a very different kind of heat that she realises she has once again said something terribly, horribly wrong.

“This place,” he says, shuddering all over, “is not my home.”

The vehemence taste strange, not like she expects. Sandy anticipates anger or bitterness, resentment that she’d dare to imply that this monastery is anything like his own, but that’s not what she sees, not what she feels. When the words throw themselves over her, knotting around her throat, all she finds in them is pain. Shame that sticks to her tongue, grief that lodges underneath and makes it hard to swallow, the choking, all-devouring need to run, to _hide_ —

It’s her own emotion, she realises, not his. Her pain rushing to the surface, her grief cutting off her breath, her memories making her whimper.

She sees herself briefly as a child, abandoned and crying on the side of the road, watching as the world shrank down to one singular fact: _you can never go home again_. She sees herself older and wilder, a monster with sharp teeth and a knife in her hands, and the Scholar teaching her, quietly, patiently, what she was and what it meant. She remembers her voice rising for the first time with hope, still like a child in so many ways, and the way he turned away, his dark eyes — so like Tripitaka’s — growing darker with regret.

_Can I go home with you? This place—_

_No. There is no home for you there._

She understands why, of course. Now, at least, she does. Too dangerous for a god to be above ground. Dangerous for the monks to be seen harbouring one, dangerous for everyone if she should be found. Dangerous for them, dangerous for her, dangerous for the resistance and the rest of world. It was very important that she stay hidden, a shameful secret tucked out of sight in the dark and the cold, where the demons couldn’t find her and see her for what she was, where the humans couldn’t find her and see what she was not.

She understands. She really does. But the rejection stung back then, and it lingers even now, outside a very different monastery, one that would throw open its doors and welcome her if she’d only lay down her weapon.

She can’t forget his voice, can’t unhear his words and the feeling they brought with them. _There is no home for you there,_ he said, and even after all this time she looks around and thinks there’s no home for her anywhere.

“I understand,” she says to Tripitaka, clogged with tears.

Tripitaka’s hand falls away. “No,” he says, “you don’t.”

She doesn’t try to argue, doesn’t try to share her own feelings, the leaden weight of the door between her back and the place that might have offered a sanctuary. She just looks at him, the ashen greys and pale blues, the taste of citrus that sparks on her tongue when he’s conflicted, the smell of winter after a heavy snow, of spring after a heavy rain, of the world in all its moments after any kind of heaviness has left its mark.

“Perhaps you’d like to explain, then?” she presses, clumsy but well-meaning. “So that I can?”

He looks up at her, looking small and fragile and so, so vulnerable. His eyes are dark, shrouded in shadow, but Sandy sees a burst of white blossoms behind them, the flash of sunlight, and she is dazzled and blinded.

She doesn’t really expect that he’ll open up. He is nearly as closed-off as she is, and she knows that she would never have that much courage if it was her heart on display.

But he does. He breaks himself open, his hurt and grief and fear, and he looks at her as he speaks, as he spills all his feelings onto the wet stone, and he is so much braver, this tiny little human, than Sandy, in all her godliness, will ever be.

“They’re monks,” he says, blurting it out like a spasm. He speaks like a bustling kitchen, the rhythm of a knife as it falls again and again, chopping, the strong aroma of onion as it splits apart under the blade; it makes Sandy’s eyes sting, makes her head throb a little. “They’re monks, Sandy. _Real_ monks. They’ve dedicated their entire lives to this path, just like the Scholar did. If I let them welcome me into their home, into their private spaces, I... it’ll ruin everything. Those spaces are for... for real monks. Like him, like them. I’m not like them, I can’t, I’m not...”

He repeats himself a few more times, and the more discordant he sounds the more Sandy feels trapped and cornered. She wants to touch him, to comfort him, to tell him again that he’s wrong, that he is just as much a monk as any other, even the Scholar himself, that he is just as real, just as true, just as everything. She wants to pour herself into him until he sees himself as she does, pale blue and sugar-dusted and smelling of spring, until he can see, really _see_ how much he means to her.

But she doesn’t know how. She can barely speak at all, and he is so lost but still so much more than her, and it is all so much.

So, instead, she flounders, falters, and repeats herself like the babbling idiot she is.

“You think so little of yourself, Tripitaka.” An obvious statement, to be sure, but perhaps one that he needs to hear. “But it’s not true. All these things you think, they’re not—”

“It _is_ true.” He reaches out, not to touch this time but to shake; he grips her arms with fingers turned to steel, and he shakes her until her head is spinning, until she’s dizzy and disoriented. “I’m not like them. Maybe I can be enough for you or Monkey or the resistance, but these men and women are real. I can’t deceive them. I _won’t_.”

That is a lot of words. A lot of words, and so many of them that Sandy doesn’t understand.

 _Real_ , as if she and Monkey somehow aren’t, as if the resistance is somehow insignificant next to these stranger-monks he’s only just met. And _deceive_ , like his mere existence is some kind of heinous crime, like he thinks he will bring down destruction on this place simply by walking through its doors, simply by—

_There is no home for you here._

Sandy closes her eyes, swallows hard. Tripitaka finally releases her arms, and she stumbles back, feeling the world grow smaller and somehow even more frightening.

“You think so little of yourself,” she says again, no doubt pointlessly. It didn’t work the first time; she has no idea why she would expect it to work a second. “You think yourself so unworthy, but you’re not. You’re—”

“ _No_.” His voice is stronger now, rich like the coffee she smells sometimes in the depths of his eyes. “Sandy, there are things about me I can’t talk about. Even to you. And you’re... you’re the person it’s easiest to be myself with. Or a part of myself, anyway. The part that _was_ , the part that gets so lonely, the part that’s out _here_ instead of in _there_.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath; Sandy mirrors it with one of her own. “But I can’t... there are lines I can’t cross, Sandy, even with you. And you can’t... you can’t know how I feel, you can’t understand what I’m saying, because I can’t _let_ you.”

It bursts out of him like a cataclysm, like the heavens have split open and thrown themselves down between them. Sandy is staggered for a moment, overwhelmed by the passion in him, all the pain and grief and desperation, and for a terrible, endless moment she has no idea what to do.

She wants to resist, of course. She wants to fight hard, with every part of herself, to make him see that there’s no part of him worth hiding if it causes him pain, that nothing in the world would make her feel less deeply for him, would make her heart stop quaking at the sound of his name. There are flavours in his eyes, scents in his voice, a thousand different colours in his smile; she has never known anyone to flood so many of her senses at once, to ignite the whole of her simply by _being_.

But she doesn’t know how to tell him all that. She doesn’t know if he would believe her, if he is even capable of believing such wondrous things about himself. He is so shy, so full of self-doubt and self-loathing, so confused and helpless and lost. Sandy understands this as well, far too intimately to expect that someone like her will be able to change it.

So she doesn’t fight, doesn’t resist. He has told her what he believes is true, and it is her duty to accept him, accept that, with all the grace she has available to her.

“Okay,” she says, the word like treacle on her tongue. “Should I stop talking? Monkey doesn’t like it when I talk too much. If you feel so burdened, would silence be better?”

He opens his mouth, half-nodding, then stops himself.

“No.” The colours, scents, flavours shift and blur, as every part of him softens. “It’s okay. I just need to be somewhere it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t,” Sandy says. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t. And I won’t ask, not if you don’t want me to. I won’t. You can just... just _be_. Yes?”

True, every word: it really, truly doesn’t matter. She’s lost count by now of all the things she doesn’t understand about Tripitaka, all the things he won’t let her understand, doesn’t want her to understand, all the little parts of himself that he keeps locked up and hidden and tucked out of sight. She thought it would be a balm to him, being back in a monastery at last, a place where he could release those things, share them with his fellow monks, but it seems he is even more uncomfortable with them than he is with her.

She knows she should bad for him. She can see how deeply he’s hurting, how badly he yearns to be a part of this world, this life he misses so much. But there is hurt in her as well, and it is so much less when he’s standing with her. It burns, the most wonderful cleansing fire, like the kind of purification the Scholar used to talk about when she asked him what it was like to have faith. It burns, and she wants to share that with him, with Tripitaka, but she has nothing to give but herself, and she knows that’s not nearly enough.

Beside her, as though feeling some part of that, he sighs.

It’s different now, deep but not so heavy any more, like he’s shrugging off whatever pain was bearing down on him; his breath is warm, even in the cold, rain-damp air, and it brings him a little bit closer, his body sliding back into her personal space. He doesn’t touch her with intent, but the backs of his fingers brush naturally against the fabric at her wrist, and the contact turns her insides to clean, cold rainwater.

“I love that you don’t ask,” he says, very softly. “It means a lot to me.”

Sandy feels a burning in her chest, not entirely pleasant, like the aftertaste of too many spices. “If I asked about all the things I don’t understand,” she mumbles, “I’d never have time or breath to do anything else.”

That’s true too. The world above ground is a messy, headache-inducing thing; there are days, even now, where she can’t keep her eyes open for more than a minute before she starts to feel sick and scared and overwhelmed.

“It’s comforting,” Tripitaka says. His fingers slide down, press briefly against her palm, then tangle in her own. “Knowing that there’s someone else on this quest who doesn’t understand everything.”

Sandy swallows. Her mouth is full of acid, the bitter taste of her own unwanted panic. Contact is still such a devastating, world-shattering thing, even from someone she would trust with her life; she wonders if Tripitaka can hear her heart thundering through the downpour, if he can feel her breath catching in her chest, her throat.

“There are things I do understand,” she whispers. “Not having a home. Not belonging, even among your own kind.” Her fingers flex, squeezing his; it is instinct, but it makes them both stiffen. “The reasons don’t matter, Tripitaka. Keep them, if you will. But the _feeling_...”

This, she understands. This, he cannot keep from her.

“Yeah.” He’s looking up at her, eyes burning like beacons in the dark. There is pain there, and warmth, and something that makes her heart stutter and shake, something she doesn’t recognise but still feels all the way down to her bones. “You... Sandy, you’re so much of me. I wish I could share with you, just how much. But I can’t. I _can’t_.”

“I know. You’ve said this.” She brings their hands up, presses his palm to her lips, a sort-of kiss that terrifies her rather more than it does him. “You told me not to ask. I won’t. But you should know that I don’t need to. I know your name and what it means. I know who you are inside, where even the name can’t touch. And I know, on occasion, what it is that you feel. I don’t need to know any more.”

His throat convulses, catching the rhythm of the rain; he has never looked so beautiful to her. “Sandy.”

Sandy shakes her head, turns to the monastery door, a barrier between one world and another.

“Neither of us have a home in there,” she says, with reverence. “So we’ll make one out here. Enough, yes?”

Tripitaka bites his lip. He looks smaller than she’s ever seen him, as small as she herself so often feels.

“Enough,” he breathes, and stretches up until to kiss her cheek, warm lips balming her frozen skin for a moment that goes on and on. “Yes.”

And it is. Enough, and more besides. More of a sanctuary than Sandy has ever known, more safety and peace and calm than she ever thought she would see. Here, watching the rain drown the earth, untouched by anything but him, untouched by the fear of the vastness beyond this roof, within and above. There is no need to go back inside, even if she did belong there; even the holiest of sanctuaries would be nothing next to this.

Tripitaka pulls back a little, gazing up at her through half-lidded eyes. He looks less uncomfortable now, and his smile is real and warm, melted chocolate and a crackling fireplace, the closest thing to a home that Sandy has ever known.

If that is all she ever accomplishes, she thinks, it will be more than she ever could have hoped.

**


	6. All In All

**

The streets are filled with shouting.

Shouting, singing, sobbing. People hugging, dancing, crying with each other, their voices high and loud and endless. A thousand flavours of celebration, a thousand shades of freedom, perfumed and potent and powerful. Above them, the Jade Mountain looms, as ominous and threatening now as it was when it teemed with demons, but no-one seems to notice it at all.

The mountain, Sandy thinks, is the least frightening thing here.

She should be happy. No, she _is_ happy. Truly, she is. She’s just rather overwhelmed as well, and it is difficult to find the joy she knows is there when the other part is so relentless and so loud.

The mayhem at the banquet, she could bear. Easily, perhaps even comfortably. The thrill of combat, the haze of necessary violence, her vision blurring with the smell of blood, reds and blacks on her tongue, fire scalding her throat, her belly, her everything. But there is no blood out here in the street, and the only fire is safely contained in lanterns and candles and celebratory pyrotechnics; her survival instincts are sleeping, as they have earned the right to do, but she does not feel safe. She feels like the animal she used to be, like a stray cat scrambling around with its hackles up, frightened by the noise.

There are no quiet spaces in a street overflowing with people. Even the alleys are occupied, excited couples celebrating their lives or unconscious drunks regretting theirs. Nowhere to hide, no shadow or crack to slip into, no private corner to put her head down and—

“Breathe, you idiot.”

Sandy jolts, startled.

“Monkey?”

He’s got her by the arm, hauling her away before she’s fully processed that it is in fact him. There are people everywhere and she is frozen, paralysed, transfixed; he has to shove her out of the path of an oncoming group lest they plow straight through her. No quiet spaces, nowhere to hide, but still somehow Monkey succeeds where she failed, finding a little piece of wall that doesn’t have anyone too close and nudging her up against it.

“You looked like you were about to faint or something.”

There is no sympathy in him, no compassion or kindness, nothing tender at all. He speaks like she’s an annoyance, barely worth a passing thought. Sandy doesn’t know why that helps, but somehow it does. 

“I’m fine,” she says, swallowing hard. “Thank you.”

“Sure you are.” He rolls his eyes, unimpressed. “Leave it to you to be the only one miserable during a celebration.”

Sandy pouts. “I’m not miserable.”

“Seriously?”

His eyes bore through her, charcoal and hot metal. Sandy concedes with a sigh. “It’s just... rather loud.”

“Uh huh.” He doesn’t soften, exactly, but he seems to appreciate the honesty. “Come on, now. Breathe.”

Sandy does so. In and out, in and out, until speaking is easier. “I’m all right, Monkey. It’s not a problem.”

“I know that.” He glances over his shoulder, then leans closer, smug and sort of conspiratorial. “ _I_ know you’re fine. You can take care of yourself, we’ve all seen it. But the little fake-monk was worried, and wanted me to check up on you.”

“I...” She wets her lips; they’re dry as dust. “Tripitaka?”

His expression doesn’t change, but she sees something shift in him just the same. Reds and golds edged with black, on a good day he tastes like fallen leaves and smells like spiced tea; tonight, even though he’s clearly relishing their victory, he tastes more like overripe fruit. A little too sweet, a little too soft, like he’s trying too hard to look a certain way or to wear the proper face.

“Who else?” he says after a too-long beat. “He... I mean, she... uh...” He scrunches up his face, like he’s trying to navigate a particularly complex equation. “Ugh. You know.”

“She should be celebrating our victory,” Sandy says, ignoring his clumsiness. “And so should you.”

He snorts. “Yeah, well, so should _you_. ” Eyes darkening for a moment, like the pine-fresh smell of a forest at night, he glances over his shoulder once more. “Look, if you don’t want to be here, just go and be somewhere else. I’ll tell the monk... uh, the not-monk... that is, the... er...”

“Tripitaka,” Sandy says again.

“Yeah, him. Uh, her. I mean...”

Sandy pats his arm. It is an awkward moment for them both. “It’s not so complicated, Monkey. I’m sure you’ll get used to it in time.”

His grimace says he doesn’t believe her. Sandy wants to offer him a deeper kind of comfort, but she doesn’t really know what to do or say; male or female, monk or not, to her, Tripitaka is the same as she has always been: _Tripitaka_. Nothing has changed except that a few confusing encounters now make sense.

Well, as much sense as things ever really make to her, which is probably very little.

Not so for Monkey, apparently. His confusion is palpable, crushed berries and mulch, and if she wasn’t so overwhelmed by the festivities Sandy might almost find it amusing.

She is overwhelmed, though, far too much to enjoy his floundering. And Monkey, even in his confusion, notices. Such a long way he’s come, she thinks, to actually notice someone else’s discomfort; he shakes himself out of his reverie and gives her a nudge. It’s friendly, at least she thinks it is, but not very gentle. She wonders if she makes for an easy target, if he’s venting his frustration through her. She finds she wouldn’t mind if he did.

“Town gate’s that way,” he says, cocking his thumb over his shoulder. “Nothing but empty space and silence. Perfect for a socially-awkward weirdo like you, right?”

He’s showing his teeth, teasing and gentle, the jibe clearly meant as an endearment. Sandy, who has been called far worse in her time, and without the cinnamon-flavoured twinkle she scents in his smirk, takes it as one without a thought.

“Thank you,” she says, and wonders if he too can taste the colours of her relief. “You’ll tell Tripitaka?”

“Sure.” His shrug seems a little heavier than usual, but his grin does not falter. “Not that I’d need to. He... _she_ always finds us in the end, right?”

Sandy’s stomach clenches, nausea sharpening acid-rich inside of her. She hasn’t let herself think about the North Water since she reached the Jade Mountain, hasn’t allowed herself time to process the feelings of rejection, of unwantedness, of being abandoned — _again_ — by someone she foolishly believed might have cared. She hasn’t let it all sink in yet, afraid of what will happen when it does.

“Excuse me,” she mumbles, feeling herself grow pale. Her mouth is thick with the taste of salt water, of the ocean pouring itself down her throat. “That way, you said? The town gate? I think I’ll, uh...”

Monkey’s frown, not quite concern but closer than he usually gets, is unexpectedly touching.

“Uh, good idea.” He tilts his head to one side, studying her. “Better get going. You look a bit...”

“It’s nothing. But I should go.” She hesitates only briefly, long enough to find his hand and squeeze a little, all the reassurances she cannot speak poured out through the skin. “Thank you, Monkey.”

And she flees, head down and hood up, oblivious to the dozen people who crash into her as she goes.

*

Beyond the town’s bounds, it is no less difficult to breathe.

Behind her, the clamour of celebration, not muffled nearly enough by the distance. Her vision is a bit clearer out here, but only a bit. She’s not so blinded or dazed by the sea of bodies, of colours and flavours and smells, of too many sensations all at once, but she can still sense them, like someone stood too close behind her, breathing down her neck. People, so many people, and she’s happy for them, really, but even a god has limits; she can’t endure so much stimulation for so long.

In front of her, just as Monkey promised, a sea of nothing. On and on it goes, all the way to the horizon.

She’s used to it now, the great big terrifying world. The open space, the endlessness, the way it feels like drowning every time she takes a step forward. The sky, too, sometimes, in all its breathless infinity, has become almost familiar.

Only almost, though, and only sometimes. When she’s feeling sheltered and safe and brave. Not like now, not like this.

She sat under the sky, afterwards. After she left the North Water, after Tripitaka let her go, after the cold, dark night threw its cloak across the world and the sky turned black and moonless. She sat beneath it, alone and shivering and frozen to the bone, and she thought of another night, long gone now, of gazing up at the sky and feeling so frightened, of Tripitaka hiding with her inside a rotted tree, the two of them alone but also not, of the first kiss she’d ever known pressed like a promise to her cheek.

Tripitaka was different then. A boy and a monk, seeking something kindred with a god, a woman, with _her_.

Strange, Sandy thinks, how the tiniest change can become so big. Now they’re both women, and it shouldn’t matter at all, but all of a sudden there’s nothing kindred between them at all.

The sky is quiet tonight. Quieter than the earth, at least. Quieter than the maelstrom of voices and bodies and explosions, the screams and screeches of freedom in the town behind. Quieter than humans and gods, much quieter than the demons fleeing blindly into the night, defeated and desperate and devastated; Sandy wishes she could feel a little pity for them, but she still wakes sometimes in the middle of nights like these, soaked in the sweat of things their kind did to her.

She looks up into the endless void, the great vast blanket that covers the world, that could so easily suffocate her if it fell. She wonders if it would feel the same to drown in all that black as it felt to drown in water all those years ago.

Tonight, for the first time in a very long time, she thinks she wouldn’t mind finding out.

*

It is no surprise, not at all, when she blinks her eyes open a short while later and finds that she’s not alone.

“Tripitaka.” Her voice is hollow. “You should be celebrating.”

Sliding into her personal space, Tripitaka’s body is no different to the one she remembers: slender and lithe, small but incredibly strong. If she didn’t know it to be true, Sandy might assume that nothing had changed at all, that _she_ was still _he_ , that he was no more than a lonely young monk seeking some nameless colour of kinship in an equally lonely young god.

 _I wish I could tell you,_ she said once, when she was him, _how much it means to me_.

Back then, her voice was deep and rough, a chipped mask with rough edges. It wasn’t really hers, but it settled so sweetly on Sandy’s tongue, slid down her throat like sugar, like warm bread heavy with butter, like all the hot meals she’s never had, all the colours she never knew existed. Now it’s higher, gentler, softer; now it’s a thousand times more beautiful and a thousand times more free, but it leaves Sandy feeling razed and cut open.

“Monkey said I’d find you out here.” She doesn’t reach out, doesn’t touch like she normally would, but Sandy can tell that a part of her wants to. “Not feeling so uneasy about the sky tonight?”

Sandy holds her breath for a few moments before answering. “It’s not as unsettling as other things.”

She means the obvious, the teeming mass of people back in the town, their shouting, their celebration, their hard-earned triumph. She means the closeness, the press of unfamiliar bodies and souls, the way she can’t avoid being touched, being noticed, being seen. She means the Jade Mountain and everything that happened there, the almost-disaster and the heady victory. She means—

She means _this_ : Tripitaka, glittering in the dark, looking up at her like she’s more endless than the sky.

“Sandy.” Her name is a flurry, little snowflakes that shatter when they hit the ground. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” She closes her eyes, tries to breathe like Monkey told her to. Somewhere behind her, a voice rings out, a whoop of joy that lands in her stomach like a stone. “No.”

Tripitaka nods. Sandy has a feeling she knew the answer before she even asked the question. “Can I help?”

“No.” The word is stale, unpleasant; it tastes like the lie it is. “Yes. I don’t know. Everything is so noisy.”

She glances over her shoulder as she says it, pointed and deceptive, though of course Tripitaka is far too clever to believe she’s only talking about the town. The noise inside her head is far louder now: the rust-on-bone screech of abandonment, the foul rotten smell of the North Water chasing her for leagues and leagues, the funereal wail at the Jade Mountain, the horror of almost losing the one person in all the world who gave her life meaning, the lifting choir of relief when it didn’t happen, when she — _they_ — survived.

It is confusing, to feel so many different things all at once.

It is... _noisy_.

She’s gripping her scythe too tightly. Her fingers ache, but she can’t seem to unclench them. Tripitaka is watching her, eyes dark and a little bit damp; she looks like she wants to prise the weapon out of Sandy’s hands, throw it away, and—

And what?

Before, Sandy might have been able to guess. Now, she is too afraid to even try.

“I’m sorry,” Tripitaka says, very quietly.

The words taste strange, like nothing Sandy has ever known before, a flavour without a name, colours that defy description. She can smell summer and winter and all their myriad gifts, snow and sweat and the sickly sting of blood, like when she bites her lip too hard. There is so much sincerity in the apology, so much that is real, that is true, but she can’t seem to catch hold of its meaning.

She wants to hide. She thought she _was_ hiding. Tripitaka has always been the one exception to her need for solitude, the one person who could hide with her and not make the world less safe, but she doesn’t feel that way any more, she is no longer the haven she once was. 

Sandy blinks at her, tries to wrap the apology around her aching head, but it doesn’t work. She’s standing so close, just like she always did before, but there is so much distance between them now.

“I don’t understand,” she whispers. “I feel...”

“I know.” Tripitaka’s eyes are very wet now; Sandy tastes salt, smells coffee and chocolate and the death of a family that never was. “‘Uneasy’.”

Sandy shakes her head. Then, reluctantly, she nods.

“Uneasy,” she echoes, though of course it’s not true.

She is frightened, plain and simple. Of the noise, endless and violent, the shouts and cheers from the town behind her, the cling and clamour inside her head. Of the woman standing in front of her, the woman who is not a boy and not a monk, who knows Sandy more intimately than she knows herself. Of her own mind, her own body, all the parts of herself that are so weak and all the parts of Tripitaka that are so powerful. She could reach into Sandy’s chest, if she wanted, and tear the heart clean out of her, and Sandy would do nothing but stand there and let the pain claim her.

As she did before. As she did when she left the North Water, when she left Tripitaka, when she left—

There are far more terrifying things than the sky, she realises now. And she doesn’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry,” Tripitaka says again. “The way I spoke to you at the North Water. The way I treated you, I...”

She doesn’t finish. Perhaps she’s frightened, too, of laying bare her mistakes, her unintentional cruelty, of exposing too much of her new-old self and realising that perhaps she was a better person before, when she, like Sandy, was hiding herself away.

“You needed me,” Sandy says slowly, feeling out her tattered heart with great care. “When you were pretending to be a boy. You needed me to be what you could not. To remind you of the person... the _woman_ that you were.”

The word is difficult to say; she’s never really thought of herself as a woman before, only as a demon or a monster, a god in hiding, a threat, an animal, a mistake. A _thing_ , sexless and shapeless and wholly unworthy.

Still, Tripitaka nods, as if she really does see Sandy in those terms, a _woman_ , a _person_ , a _someone_. “Yeah.”

It shouldn’t really feel like a revelation. Sandy wills herself not to reel. “But then you became yourself again. And I became something else too. A reminder of what you were forced to become. The quest and everything it took away from you. I called you ‘Tripitaka’, and you... I think it hurt you.”

Tripitaka is blinking back tears. She did that back then, too, but it was very, very different. Perhaps because Sandy was a little bit salt-blind then as well.

“It did,” Tripitaka admits quietly.

Sandy swallows. “I think I hurt you too,” she goes on, feeling pulled apart and broken. “Not just by calling you that, I mean. Just by... just by being there. I think, when you looked at me, all you could see was yourself, pretending to be him. The things you had to say and do and hide, the thing you had to become. I think it hurt to see me and remember. I think a part of you felt...”

“No.” Her voice is a cascade of colours, like a prism made of shattered glass. “No, Sandy. Never.”

Sandy ignores her. She has to; if she stops now, she’ll never find the courage to finish, and she needs to finish for both of their sakes.

“I think a part of you _resented_ me,” she says, teeth chattering, vision blurring. “I think you wanted me to leave, not so you could be with your new family, but so you wouldn’t have to look at me any more. So you wouldn’t have to remember what it was like to look into my eyes and feel... and feel...”

 _And feel_.

She lets it hang on the air, lets them both pretend the sentence is unfinished. Her voice is shattered too, like Tripitaka’s, but there is no colour in her at all. She is the same ash-white thing she’s always been: a spectre, a demon, a monster carved from shards of ice.

Tripitaka is staring at her like that’s what she sees too, like all that _someone_ has evaporated and left only the monster behind. Wide-eyed, mouth half-open, she’s looking at her like she wants to say something awful but can’t find the strength or the courage. Sandy can see the conflict in her, blinding, deafening, overpowering as it always is, and she marvels at how someone can be so much the same and yet so completely transformed.

Tripitaka is still Tripitaka. This Sandy knows with every atom in her body. The boy monk who spoke his name in the sewers with a blade pressed to his throat, the young woman who stood up in a middle-of-nowhere little village and announced her birthright to everyone, and the not-so-young woman who stood at the top of the Jade Mountain, who looked up at the great and powerful Monkey King and said, without hesitation, _I am Tripitaka_.

All of those people are one and the same. They smile in the same beautiful shades of blue, their eyes still taste like coffee or chocolate or butter-soaked bread, and her voice still rings out in all the colours of the rainbow. Sandy has never known anyone who so assaults and soothes all of her senses at once; she would recognise that soul anywhere, whatever name it chose.

But there is something new in her as well. She has become something new by reclaiming something old, by rescuing the part of herself that was hidden. She is herself, a girl who lost her father the Scholar, a girl who had to pretend to be a boy, a girl who became Tripitaka not by choice but through something deeper, fate or destiny or just bad timing. She is who she was before, and she is who she became since; she is so many things, complex and unfathomable, is it any wonder that Sandy is blinded by her?

She’s looking up at her now with a thousand words burning behind her eyes, and Sandy wants to dive into them and drink and dream and drown, but just the thought of it leaves her paralysed with pain.

“Sandy.” A hand covering her hand, covering the haft of her scythe. Delicate, beautiful; she shouldn’t be so close to such a monstrous weapon, or the one she’s holding. “Sandy, I could never resent you.”

Sandy looks down at their hands. The world trembles around her, the smell of autumn, of dying leaves.

“You resented _him_ ,” she whispers. “The Tripitaka you pretended to be. The one you felt you had to be.”

“I wanted to be free,” Tripitaka says, a confession that clearly runs deep; it lingers on Sandy’s tongue like fresh water after a period of dehydration. “Free from the name, free from the quest. Free from having to pretend to be something I wasn’t, something I couldn’t be. I was so tired and so frightened, and so terribly...”

She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to. Sandy, who has been tired and frightened from the moment she stepped out of the sewers, knows perfectly well what other feelings come with those.

“So lost,” she breathes, recalling the taste of it, vivid and hot.

Tripitaka nods. Her eyes are trembling, a thousand oceans churning behind them, and Sandy can feel echoing tremors passing over her knuckles, the press of small fingers trembling just as hard. She’s on the brink of tears, a flood of emotion a very long time coming.

Sandy feels dizzy, overwhelmed by all these emotions that both are and aren’t her own. She tastes seawater, clean but strong, and lets herself imagine that she’s floating instead of drowning. She hears Tripitaka’s name catch on the air, distant and hazy, the colour of ash on the wind. She doesn’t remember saying it, but she’s certain she must have done. There’s no-one else here but them.

She must have done more than just say her name, too, because all of a sudden her scythe is on the ground and her arms are wrapped around slender, feminine shoulders and Tripitaka’s face is buried in her flat, unfeminine chest and everything is soaked with salt.

“I just wanted to go home,” Tripitaka sobs, holding on for dear life. “I wanted to believe I still had one.”

 _You do,_ Sandy thinks, but she doesn’t know how to put the thought into words her tongue can speak.

“I didn’t want to take that away from you,” she says instead. It’s not enough, it’s not nearly enough, but it’s all she can say. “I wasn’t trying to... I promise you that.”

“I know.” Tripitaka’s breath hitches, a hiccup that tangles in the holes and knots of Sandy’s clothes, lost for good. “And you were right. But I didn’t want to hear it.”

Sandy suspects it runs a little deeper than that, and a little more bitter too: she didn’t want to hear it from _her_. Perhaps if another of the villagers had brought her so-called mother’s identity into question, quietly and subtly, she might have taken it on board, but not from Sandy. Not when her presence was such a pointed, painful reminder of everything she was running away from: the name, the quest, and all its consequences. She did not want to be Tripitaka any more, and she couldn’t bear to see Sandy looking at her like she still was.

Sandy understands that, of course. After everything that had happened, who wouldn’t feel that way? But she had her own pain to work through too, and Tripitaka’s rejection tasted too much like abandonment, like all the worst memories still lodged inside of her head. It poisoned her, and so she did what she always does when she is ill or injured, scared or in pain: she ran, and she hid.

It’s the only response she has, the only thing she knows how to do. Run, hide, make herself small and invisible. Find the dark places and make them a home, her home, the only sort of home that would welcome a creature like her. The world has changed so much since she left the sewer — _she_ has changed so much — but those instincts haven’t died yet and she’s not sure they ever will. She is what she is, and she can no more stop herself from hiding when she’s in pain than Tripitaka could have faced the truth she wasn’t yet ready to see.

Neither one of them can change their nature, not completely, but they can learn from their mistakes and try to grow. Sandy might never be able to see the sky without feeling uneasy — no, _frightened_ — but at least she can look at it now and keep her legs locked under her. She can stand beneath it, in all its vastness, and hold herself still and steady, and swallow down the need to hide.

And Tripitaka, who is still Tripitaka, who cannot turn away from the name that was meant for her. She is herself now, the young woman she always was, the truth she hid so well beneath the robes; she is whole and she is free and she is more beautiful than any other soul Sandy has ever known, but even now, even after everything she’s been through, she is still _Tripitaka_.

That is what matters, nothing else. They are who they are, themselves, and they know what that means.

“It’s over,” she says, holding Tripitaka tight and feeling the contact like a blow. “We both came back.”

Tripitaka hugs her so tightly her ribs creak. “I know.”

“We always will.” Sandy pulls back just a little, gazes up at the inky black sky, the unending world spinning slowly above their heads. “I mean to say... I will. To you. I’ll always...”

“I know.” She stretches up, arms locked around Sandy’s neck, and kisses her cheek. “Even when you didn’t know it, I did. You’re the one thing I can always count on, Sandy. The place I’ve always been able to go, the safest, the warmest. The place that’s most like me.”

Sandy isn’t sure that’s the compliment Tripitaka seems to think it is. To be likened to Tripitaka is, of course, a blessing beyond her imagining. But for Tripitaka to see herself as something like _her_ , to see something in Sandy that is worth connecting to, that is worth calling kindred? That is something she wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Now that they are both women, now that this is known to everyone and no longer something to hide, Tripitaka should turn around and leave, get as far away from Sandy as she possibly can. But how to make someone so stubborn and starry-eyed realise that?

“You don’t have to think that way any more,” Sandy says, with as much tact as she can. There is a strange taste in her mouth, cold and metallic, like someone is pressing the flat of a blade to her tongue; it makes it hard to speak, and harder to think. “You are yourself now, whole and complete. You can be who you are, who you always were, and you don’t need to depend on me to remind you. You don’t need me to...”

 _You don’t need me_.

The blade turns on her tongue. Blood floods her mouth.

Tripitaka, still poised on the tips of her toes, is much closer to eye-level than Sandy is accustomed to. There is something rather overwhelming about it, something intense and vivid, and entirely too close. Like this, she can feel all the colours of Tripitaka’s gaze, can taste its myriad flavours, all its warmth, its heat, its fire, and she can’t hide her own fast enough to avoid being burned.

“I do,” Tripitaka whispers, and Sandy can’t escape the words, the truth, any more than she can break free of her too-dark eyes, the tidal pull of something more powerful than any demon or god. “I do need you.”

Her fingers tangle in Sandy’s hair, a shock of roughness as she yanks her down. Sandy yields by instinct, as she always has, as she surely always will. Tripitaka could bring her towards the edge of the world and order her to dive — to throw herself into the abyss, just as Monkey did at the Jade Mountain, with nothing but faith to suspend her — and she would do so without hesitation. She would yield then, and she yields now just as well, letting Tripitaka do as she likes, as she always—

“...oh.”

The taste of blood vanishes, washed away by water and salt, drowned by love and warmth and a place like home.

Tripitaka kisses her like she holds her: fiercely and hungrily, with all the locked-up passion of someone who is only just learning what it is to be herself. Sandy is staggered, stunned; she thinks for a moment that she’s gone blind as well, until she blinks and realises her eyes were closed.

She pulls back, reeling, disoriented. It takes every ounce of strength she has to keep from falling over.

Tripitaka, blinking rapidly, touches her lips. She looks as stunned as Sandy feels, like maybe this wasn’t as planned as she wants her to believe, like maybe she’s taken herself a little bit by surprise as well. Passion is a strange thing, confusing; watching her own face reflected in dark, chocolate-flavoured eyes, Sandy thinks she’s never looked so pale before, or so filled with colour.

“I do,” Tripitaka says again, hoarse for the first time with something other than pain. “Like this as well. I...”

Sandy doesn’t really know what ‘like this’ is supposed to mean. The way she is now, perhaps, unhidden and honest at last? Or perhaps she means the passion, the fervour, the heat coiling like blood in their bellies, kisses not on the cheek but on the mouth, kisses not to give comfort or gratitude, but to ignite, to inflame, to—

“Any way,” Sandy hears herself choke. “Like this, like that, like anything. I don’t care what you’re made of, Tripitaka, inside or outside or anywhere else. I don’t care how you need me, or why, or what. I just...”

 _I need you too,_ she doesn’t say, because she can’t, because—

Because there are no words, not in any language Tripitaka can understand, to describe all the colours Sandy sees in her eyes, all the colours that have not changed, that will never change. She is a hundred shades of red, a thousand shades of blue, she is ash-grey when she’s upset, ice-white when she’s excited, she is spring in the morning and winter at night, and her smiles are brighter than the summer’s highest sun. She is fresh snow on Sandy’s eyelashes, the salt of the sea on her lips and her tongue. She was all of those things long before she was _this_ , long before the taste of her was real.

“You never cared,” Tripitaka says. She’s cupping Sandy’s face, brushing her thumb across her lips, bruised and sore and tasting of rainbows. “You never cared who I was or why I behaved the way I did, why it meant so much to me that you were... that you’d let me...”

“I cared.” She closes her eyes again, deliberately this time, and drowns in the salt-tasting blue of the ocean at night. “I cared that you were safe. I cared that you were happy. I cared that you didn’t hate me or resent me or want me to leave your side.” She feels a hitch in her throat, a kick in her chest. She smells cedar and burned ash. “I cared about the things that mattered.”

When she opens her eyes, she finds Tripitaka staring at her again. She’s breathless, soundless, but Sandy can see thousands of words taking shape behind her eyes, poised on the tip of her tongue. The lush greens of a forest in spring, the yellow-golden glow of a field in summer, the darkening blue-grey of the sky before it rains, the only time in the world when its vastness doesn’t terrify her.

“Sandy,” Tripitaka whispers at last, and it is only one word but it is all those thousands of words as well.

Sandy tries to steady her breathing. There is a richness settling on her tongue, something exotic and beautiful, a flavour she doesn’t recognise and cannot name. Her head swims with the sound of colours that shouldn’t exist, colours that only become real when she sees them reflected in Tripitaka’s eyes. She is drowning, and she is so alive.

“I...” She sounds as shaky as she feels. “You should know, I’ve never... um... I don’t know how to...”

“You know more than you think,” Tripitaka says; apparently she doesn’t need to hear the end of the sentence to decide that it is wrong. “Sandy, you’ve been _everything_. The whole time I was hiding who I really was, lying to my friends, feeling lonely and isolated and lost and afraid... the whole time you were there, giving me everything I needed.”

Sandy grimaces. That may be true, but even if it is...

“I didn’t know what I was giving. It shouldn’t count.”

“But it does.”

So saying, she stretches back up to kiss her again, lightly this time, and with a kind of tenderness Sandy has never felt before. Soft and sweet and so full of love, it tastes like her voice when she was a boy, full of sugar and crushed ice. Sandy feels more dizzy from this, the sweetness and the tenderness, than she did from the passion and the heat.

“You are no less unusual as a girl,” she manages, when Tripitaka lets her go, “than you were as a boy.”

Tripitaka laughs. High and gentle and so, so real, Sandy thinks it might be the first genuine laugh she’s heard from her since the quest began. Her laughter is the colour of fading daylight, the sun setting over a still lake, the scent of fresh, clean earth, the promise of a hot meal and a warm bed; it is life and love and so many other things besides, and Sandy could spend the rest of eternity listening to it.

“Maybe I am,” Tripitaka murmurs. “But you’re a pretty unusual god too. So I think it works out well.”

Sandy can’t deny that. It tightens her stomach, throwing cold water over the warmth settling there. It is not the warm, loving connection that Tripitaka thinks it is, not even close, and she doesn’t know how to make her see that.

“You’ve seen the trouble that comes from that,” she says. “My... unusualness. It’s not a safe place to invest your heart.”

Tripitaka’s smile is breathtaking, stunning. Sandy can’t even begin to count all the colours she sees in it. “I think it is.”

She is wrong, of course, totally wrong. But Sandy is blinded by her radiance and she can’t find the words to tell her so.

Words come so hard to her, explanations even harder. She doesn’t know how to express this most significant of differences, this place where they are so separate, so unalike. Tripitaka is the most strong-hearted, courageous soul that Sandy has ever met; discovering the truth of her identity has only reinforced this fact. A girl alone in the world, lost and bereaved, stripped of her home and family, and still she carried the name _Tripitaka_ as though it was always meant for her.

And maybe it was. Who are they to assume otherwise?

But she, Sandy is nothing like that. Her heart is a tremulous, tiny wreck of a thing, a wounded fledgling cast out from its nest; it is not ready to soar, and every time it tries it falls and fails and is crushed by its own weight. Her heart is not strong, and it’s not courageous; even now, after so much time above ground, she still trembles when she looks up and sees the sky cloudless and pricked with stars.

“I’m not...” Her voice is trembling too; she hates herself for that. “I don’t... I...”

But she doesn’t know where to begin, much less end.

Tripitaka is quiet for a while, seemingly content to just watch her, eyes half-lidded and glittering with love, love, love. In their depths, Sandy sees moonlight and dark water, the phantom of a sea she hasn’t seen since she was half as old as Tripitaka is now. The last place she called ‘home’, but it never was; she can see that now, in the ripples spreading out from Tripitaka’s pupils.

It is a devastating thing to see, to know. It is devastating to reach out, fingertips shaking, to touch the side of Tripitaka’s face, to make contact with the soft skin, the lift and curve of her smile, the _present_ , and feel in its stillness the past washing away.

Ever since she stepped out of the sewers, Sandy has been terrified. Of the sky, of the distant horizon, of dry earth and melted snow, of the sunlight and the stars, the countless little lights that chase away her precious, protective shadows. Of the world in all its bright and dull colours, its sweet and sour flavours, its scents and sensations, all the big and small ways it tries and tries to drown her.

She is so used to being frightened that, when the feeling hits her again now, it’s almost like a second heartbeat.

Tripitaka covers her hand, strong fingers pressed to her knuckles, and it is too much, too much, too—

Sandy pulls away. Lurches away, really, because she has to, because the contact is setting her skin on fire, because she is still so uncomfortable being so close, so exposed, so _seen_. She is a creature of the darkness, a wild animal locked up in a cage as much for its own safety as those around her, and she was not made to live out here under the sky, was never meant to feel the touch of human kindness or hear the whispers of human love.

Tripitaka steps back too, giving her space. She’s long accustomed to Sandy’s skittishness by now; she knows when to follow and when to keep away. She understands Sandy’s behaviour, it seems, far better than Sandy does herself. 

“Sandy.” Slow, careful, and so, so patient. She knows exactly what she’s dealing with. “It’s okay if you’re uneasy.”

The word distorts, disorients, and it throws Sandy completely off-balance. It is a flash of sunlight, too bright, thrown into her eyes. She can’t see, can’t think, can’t—

 _Uneasy_. They both know what it really means.

“Frightened.” It bursts out of her like a hiccup, like a sob. The truth tastes awful, like the poisons that were once her only food. “I’m not ‘uneasy’, Tripitaka. I’m _frightened_.”

It is the first time she’s admitted it aloud, the first time she’s allowed the truth to escape the holes in her head, the cracks between her ribs, the shadows that are all she has left of her old life, her old self. Tripitaka is not the only one being reborn out here, it seems; Sandy didn’t realise until just now, how different she’s become since she left the dark and stumbled, blind and newborn, into the light.

She has been afraid of the great, vast, endless sky for almost as long as she can remember. The first night they slept outside, the four of them together as a fledgling family, she could not sleep; her memory, unintelligible most of the time, would not stop replaying another first night: herself, alone, small, shivering, frozen, terrified, a little girl left on the side of the road, under the same big sky.

When Tripitaka found her — when _she_ found _Tripitaka_ , unknowing and unaware — she had been underground for almost her entire life. Stepping back out into the world that hated and abandoned her was a horror she never let the others see; readjusting has been a daily lesson in being terrified. But she cannot afford to indulge her stupid childish fears when the world depends on her to be a god.

The truth, though? Simple and laid bare: _I am frightened_.

It shouldn’t fill her with shame to admit that. She’s earned it, hasn’t she? After so long, she’s earned it too, the right to be herself. It shouldn’t make her flush and hide her face, even now; it shouldn’t make her want to hide again, not from the world that so hates her, but from Tripitaka, so brave and breathtaking, so much of everything that Sandy will never, ever be.

Tripitaka, who is gazing up at her like the fear makes her somehow better. Like it makes her beautiful.

“You don’t need to be,” Tripitaka says, in a voice scented with exotic flowers. “But it’s okay if you are.”

“I...” She touches her lips, tastes sunlight and strong liquor. “Thank you.”

Tripitaka takes her hand, squeezes tightly. “It’s always been okay. Always.” Her breath stutters, the colours fading from her smile for just a moment. “You never had to pretend, Sandy. You know that.”

 _Not like I had to,_ she doesn’t say.

True, yes, but it’s not that simple.

“It’s easier,” Sandy admits, staring at the ground, at her boots, and trying not to drown in the tidal pulses of contact as Tripitaka squeezes her hand again and again. “ _Uneasy_. It doesn’t taste as sour as _frightened_. Its colours don’t hurt my eyes so much. I don’t...”

She stops, shaking her head as Tripitaka’s hand falls away once more. She doesn’t have to look up to know that the affectionate warmth is fading too, replaced by familiar, unwelcome confusion.

“You say the strangest things,” Tripitaka murmurs, in a voice that says she’s really, really trying to understand.

Sandy sighs. “I don’t know how else to speak. It’s the way I see the world.” She takes a couple of deep breaths, and tries for the first time in her life to explain. “The sky tastes of fear and pain. Its colours bleed and run and melt, so many of them it makes my head ache. It is frightening. And you... you smile and I smell flowers. You laugh and I see colours that never existed, I taste meals I’ve never eaten. You kiss me and I feel safe, but I don’t know what _safe_ is supposed to feel like, I don’t even know how I recognise it. But it is there, in you. And that is frightening as well.”

When she finds the courage to look at her, Tripitaka is frowning. Puzzled, certainly, but not perturbed. Sandy is still not used to that, her strangeness being something that simply exists, a part of her no more worthy of note than Pigsy’s gluttony or Monkey’s arrogance and pride. So far as Tripitaka is concerned, it’s just who she is: a little strange, a little odd, a poorly-adjusted mess, more often confused than coherent but otherwise a worthy friend. A worthy—

She doesn’t know what. She’s afraid to know for certain. One more thing to be frightened of, she supposes.

Tripitaka doesn’t kiss her again, but she wets her lips like she wants to, and somehow that feels just as intimate.

“We’re all discovering ourselves,” she says gently. “Monkey is relearning everything he once knew about the world and his place in it. Pigsy is growing, repenting, becoming a better person. Me...” She pauses for only a moment, but her blush floods Sandy’s senses like a poem. “I mean, you know me already. What I am, who I am. All of me, I guess. I think by now you know me better than anyone.”

Sandy can’t stop staring at her mouth. “I want to,” she blurts out. Then, shamefaced, “I mean, um, yes.”

Tripitaka’s laughter is a bubbling stream, refreshingly cool. “And you. Learning how to live in the world, how to be visible and vulnerable, how to trust people to touch you and not hurt you. How to stand out in the open, under the sky, and not be...”

“...frightened?” She tries to laugh too, but she can’t. “I don’t know if that will ever happen, Tripitaka. It’s been months already, and I’m no less frightened now than I was when we began.”

It is a huge confession, earth-shaking and devastating, but Tripitaka just shrugs like it means nothing at all.

“Maybe it’ll take years,” she says. “Maybe decades. So what if it does? We have all the time in the world.”

“We?” The word settles in Sandy’s stomach like a heavy meal, rich and filling, perhaps a little too much; she feels full, slightly queasy, and more than a little bit panicked. “We, as in the four of us? Or we, as in... uh...”

“Both.”

Their bodies are touching now, Tripitaka’s hip nudging her thigh, her shoulder brushing her breasts. It is overwhelming, and yet somehow it feels almost natural. Sandy swallows down the too-full feeling, lets the taste of nausea and fear fade like a receding tide, and breathes. She looks down at Tripitaka’s hand, flower-scented and so soft; she looks down into her eyes, prismatic and endlessly dark, and she sees all the stars in the sky refracted into something safe.

“I may always be like this,” she says. “Frightened. That is, _uneasy_. I may always feel the need to hide. From the sky, from people. Sometimes from nothing at all.”

Tripitaka brings her hand up to her lips, kisses her fingertips one by one, until Sandy tastes the sea.

“That’s okay.” Her lips are warm against Sandy’s skin, her voice a balm inside her head, the palest and most beautiful blue. “I’ll still want to hide with you.”

Sandy shakes her head, unable to fathom such a thing.

“Even now?” she asks, in a shaking, terrified whisper. “You are yourself now. Free to be who you are, unburdened and unhidden. You’d still...?”

Tripitaka doesn’t hesitate, not for a moment. “Always.”

She stretches up again, cupping the back of Sandy’s neck, and her touch is so delicate and so powerful, like feathers holding a great bird suspended in that great big sky, like a creature who has never known fear, who knows only what it means to be free.

Her lips find Sandy’s cheek, her jaw, and finally her mouth, breathless little kisses that cast the most beautiful shadows. They shroud her and shield her, shelter her from all the terrifying things that lurk out here in the light, the dangers and nightmares both real and imagined. They wrap her up and hold her close, they keep her hidden from the endless sky above and the open space below, from all the noise and all the people, from everything that ever frightened her. They shimmer in the palest blue and the richest pink, and they smell of flowers and they taste of water, clean and fresh and safe.

Sandy opens her eyes, her mouth, her heart. She opens up every part of herself, everything she was and is, and drinks until the fear washes away.

***


End file.
